Fotobabble

Posted on April 9, 2010 by slav

Recently, The Nerdy Teacher Nick Provenzano posted an article on Fotobabble on his excellent blog.

Further uses include narrated postcards for Geography, commenting on photos for History, quick book reviews, commenting on art works – the uses are endless!

Fotobabbles can be embedded into blogs, wikis and other websites and shortly there will be the option of creating slideshows.

Students can use their own photos or those from copyright free or Creative Commons websites and then record a narration. Fotobabbles may be kept private, just remember to ensure the privacy box is ticked and click ‘save’. As with most social media sites, there is a way of reporting objectionable content, but there is no way of ensuring students don’t find any, unless you investigate first and supervise use.

Using Fotobabble in class could be a good introduction to Creative Commons and the moral and legal use of images.

Wikimedia Commons

Posted on April 6, 2010 by slav

Wikimedia Commons is an amazing site full of images, sounds and video clips that can be freely used as long as attribution is included. Many languages are supported and there are approximately six million files available on the site. The Welcome page explains more:

Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to everyone, in their own language. It acts as a common repository for the various projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, but you do not need to belong to one of those projects to use media hosted here. The repository is created and maintained not by paid archivists, but by volunteers. The scope of Commons is set out on the project scope pages.

Unlike traditional media repositories, Wikimedia Commons is free. Everyone is allowed to copy, use and modify any files here freely as long as the source and the authors are credited and as long as users release their copies/improvements under the same freedom to others. The Wikimedia Commons database itself and the texts in it are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution – Share Alike Licence. The licence conditions of each individual media file can be found on their description pages. More information on re-use can be found at Commons:Reusing content outside Wikimedia and Commons:First steps/Reuse.

This is a great site to use to not only teach students about digital citizenship, but also for them to consider adding to the site by contributing their own images.

TubeChop

Posted on March 26, 2010 by slav

TubeChop is a really cool tool. Basically, TubeChop lets you edit YouTube videos and then embed them into websites. So videos you want to use in class or for professional learning are always ready to go and there is no need to view irrelevant sections.

TubeChop is easy to use. Just enter the URL of the YouTube video you want to edit. Clip “chop it”. A slider appears to mark section/s of video you want to edit, hit enter and you are given the new URL and embed code.

Thanks to Jessica Brogely for sharing details of TubeChop.

Seven tools for organising web research

Posted on March 23, 2010 by slav

Richard Byrne‘s excellent Free Technology for Teachers site has outlined seven useful tools for organising web research. Some of the tools you may have seen before, some may be new.

iCyte
Memonic
Lumifi
Wet Mount
Zoho (Bright Ideas post 29/10/08)
Reframe It
Webnotes

Please see Richard’s post for all the details on what these tools can do and how to use them.

Technology and education box of tricks

Posted on March 18, 2010 by slav

The Technology and education box of tricks is a multi award winning website. The A-Z internet resources for education page lists numerous tools while briefly outlining their uses.

The creator of the site is Jose Picardo who is the

Head of Modern Foreign Languages at Nottingham High Schoo l, where I teach Spanish and German, and I believe fervently in making education compatible with the needs and expectations of our students through the effective use of technology.

LOTE teachers will also find lots of interest on the site.

Storyline Online

Posted on March 12, 2010 by slav

Storyline Online is a free site where celebrities and other well-known people read stories that have been pre-recorded.

Stories featured include:

Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge
The Polar Express
Me and my cat
Dad, are you the tooth fairy?

and readers include

James Earl Jones
Amanda Bynes
Al Gore
Melissa Gilbert
Sean Astin
Elijah Wood and
Jason Alexander

With activities and activity guides available, there is plenty of support to use Storyline Online in the classroom. All stories have captions for hearing impaired students and literacy uses.

Users can select their internet speed so that the reading is at the correct pace. Storyline Online is a program of the Screen Actors Guild Foundation

Thanks to M elissa Edwards for the link to Storyline Online.

inkpop: the online community of rising stars in teen lit

Posted on March 11, 2010 by slav

inkpop is a recent innovation by HarperCollins Publishers. Providing an online community for aspiring authors, members can vote for their favourite stories, which will then be read by the HarperCollins Editorial Board.

The website explains more:

inkpop is an online community that connects rising stars in teen lit with talent-spotting readers and publishing professionals. Our social networking forum spotlights aspiring authors and the readers who provide the positive springboard for feedback. inkpop members play a critical role in deciding who will land a publishing contract with HarperCollins. Whose work will you help rise to the top?

The FAQ page explains:

inkpop invites unpublished, published, and self-published authors to create their own personal inkpop page and post their books, short stories, essays, and poetry for public viewing. There is no word-count minimum for short stories, essays, and poetry, but authors must upload books that are at least 10,000 words in order for them to be read and critiqued by the inkpop community.

Visitors can comment on submissions and choose their top five favorites. inkpop counts the number of times a project appears to be among the five favorites of community members and uses that information to rank the projects. inkpop also recognizes the visitors who consistently recommend the best projects and uses that info to rank the most influential Trendsetters, who play a critical role in selecting top authors.

In short, talent development is a collaborative process at inkpop. Readers are talent scouts and critics who become community leaders in their search for standout projects. In turn, writers get to load up on valuable feedback from a target audience and make their projects the very best they can be.

Please note that users must be over 13 years of age and currently, English is the only language that submissions are accepted in. As per any resource used with students, please check the site out for yourself as the content is constantly changing.

inkpop sounds like a supportive community for aspiring authors. It is great to see publishers creating such resources for would-be authors.

Kids Search: the posters

Posted on March 9, 2010 by slav

The prolific and sharing guru that is Joyce Valenza has created two posters to publicise tools that students can use to search the internet. A great idea as there’s much more than just the basic Google search available, although many students might not believe that!

This first poster is for Secondary students; alerting them to the different tools and options that Google provides.

The second poster is for Primary students and aims to highlight the incredible number of options available to them. Perhaps not all tools are available in your school, but the concept behind the poster is more than useful.

Thanks to Joyce for her valuable work and her willingness to share, as always.

School Library Websites

Posted on March 4, 2010 by slav

The School Library Websites wiki provides examples of best practice school library websites that covers Elementary (Primary), Middle School and High School (although there doesn’t seem to be any examples of High Schools as yet).

Many of the sites featured are from the US, but any school library professional is welcome to join and submit their own websites to the lists. As the wiki states:

This site is meant as a wiki-clearinghouse of effective practice. It is, by no means, a comprehensive list. Rather, it represents the collective recommendations of participating colleagues. Please join us by contributing your own suggestions of exemplars of effective practice.)

In addition, there are links to

Our practice:
Reports
Book and Reading Promotion
Digital Storytelling
Inquiry/Information Fluency Instruction
Pathfinders
Digital Citizenship
Presentations
Building Tools
SchoolLibraryBloggers
SchoolLibraryTweeters
Knowledge Building Centers

This wiki is well worth a visit.

School Library Association of Victoria

Category Archives: Web 2.0 tools