I’m not wild about Interactive White Boards. My reasons are fairly simple– we don’t expect young people and teachers to identify their real learning and creative purposes often or early enough, and I question how IWBs facilitate this well. I feel it’s important to begin most learning there, and I have a hunch that when we overlook this, we increase the chances of integrating technology in ways that don’t serve any one very well. So…
On Saturday, I had the privilege of watching the middle and high school interns from the WNY Young Writers’ Studio guide small groups of writers through the next phase of our collaborative digital storytelling project. The last time we met, writers finished story boarding. On Saturday, they came prepared with props and ideas and spent a portion of the morning capturing digital stills. We plan to “wrap this up” at our Celebration of Writing on…
Over the last month, several educators (including quite a few in my own network) have launched new communities in Ning. I’m looking forward to joining the conversations that will unfold as others join and connections begin to build. Hope you will add to our learning! Jenny Luca and Jackie Gerstein have launched Students 2.0 and are opening dialogue around the potential for this exciting new space for kids. Heidi Hayes Jacobs has invited everyone to…
Found in my travels this week: VocabGrabber enables users to see how words are used in context. Confusing Words highlights the biggies that so many of us misuse. Save the Words is kinda beautiful, although I’m struggling a bit with its utility. IdiomSite.Com may become a quick favorite of some teachers I know….. RhymeZone is a rhyming dictionary and thesaurus Visuwords is an online dictionary that graphs word relationships
Jennifer started a timely conversation. I hope you’ll join in……..
Just sharing what I’ve found in my travels….. I know that I may be a bit late to the table here, but I’m loving this tool. Lately, I’ve been teaching with StoryCorps almost as often as I’ve been teaching with TED. So much potential for the classroom…… Been playing with Firefox add-ons—simple ways to download YouTube videos here. Had the chance to create a few new Sir Ken Robinson fans last week. The Future of…
Fans of Wallwisher, Glogster, Virtual Whiteboard, and Stixy might want to take a peek at Spaaze. I’ve been playing around with it a bit this week….kinda fun, and I like the bookmarklet feature. Don’t know that it allows for collaboration though. Anyone know for certain?
Resources like this stir up all sorts of questions and inspire all kinds of ideas too. I can imagine that some of the teachers that I get to work with might appreciate tools like this for what they might contribute to learning. I can also imagine that others will worry that students will use it like they often use CliffsNotes—to completely dodge texts that confuse or disinterest them. I’m wondering how to engage students meaningfully…
Some of the middle and high school writers I’m working with this year have just begun researching what digital storytelling is and how they might begin crafting their own stories. There are so many different ways to approach this and an abundance of fantastic resources available online for those interested in doing so. Rather than presenting students with one definition of what digital storytelling is or leading them through a distinct set of steps in…
I don’t think it has stopped snowing here for at least a week. When I left the house this morning, I had no idea what awaited me, and by the time I hit the thruway, I realized that any time I had set aside for blogging here would be devoted to expanding my drive time in an effort to ensure that my car didn’t careen off the road. But I made promise in this new…