Create Your Own Blog

Our last BYOL session was focused on creating your own class blog. Unfortunately, due to server problems, we didn't get very far. I wanted to remind everyone of the directions for creating a blog. Check them out here!
We will continue to work with blogs for this week's BYOL, which will be on Thursday, Jan. 15 @ 7:50.

Social Bookmarking 101

Have you ever bookmarked something as a "Favorite" on your home computer and then wanted to access it on your computer at school? Well, that used to happen to me all the time. (I just used to email myself links) Now, through the use of social bookmarking sites, you can store all your "favorites" in one location - online!

Plus, social bookmarking sites allow you to "tag" your links with multiple keywords for easy searching. For example, this game I found online could be tagged with: Spending Spree, money, smartboard, math. This way, I can find the same website under all 4 of these keywords. Cool, huh?

Plus, you can share your bookmarks with your friends, view others' bookmarks, as well as create groups for even more sharing.

Ok, check out this video explaining (way better than I have!!) the basics of Social Bookmarking. You can also find it on the right side of this blog, under "Videos".

I've used two sites for my bookmarking. I used to have Delicious and have now switched to Diigo. They're both excellent sites! But, I just decided to try something new. Here's info on the difference between Delicious and Diigo. Check out my diigo page. Alright, get your bookmarking site set up and let's share! :)

I ran across this video a couple of months ago and was just amazed. I recently saw it again and thought it was definitely worth sharing...


What did you think?

Wordle

My friend, Melanie Holtsman, introduced me to a wonderful website, Wordle. Here's what the website said about it: "Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends."

Now, how can this help your teaching??? Well, imagine how great this would be for Writing. You could have a student type up his/her work, and then paste it into Wordle. Let me guess what words will be biggest!.....SAID...AND THEN... This is a great tool to help writers become more aware of their word choice. And it's just plain FUN!

I was also challenged to make a Wordle of my classroom blog to see what words are emphasized each month. It's neat to see what we're talking about the most. Here's mine for December 7th - Wordle

You can tell that our emphasis is our Social Studies projects. I'd love to see what the Wordle looks like at the end of the year.

Try out a Wordle today!

Voicethread

I tried out a neat website, Voicethread, with my students. It allows users to record their voice to accompany pictures, slideshows, etc. I had a couple of students "narrate" the stories they had written (one actually did a PowerPoint). They absolutely loved it! The girls giggled upon hearing their voices as we shared their stories with the class. And the rest of the class thought it was "so cool!" I also posted the links on our classroom blog for our parents to enjoy. I've also seen Voicethread used to tell about how to make a Vocabulary Map. Check that out here. It really is an invaluable tool.

Kennedy's Voicethread
Nikki's Voicethread

I Remember When...

This video says it all!

I remember when...do you?