50 Sites in 60 seconds is a not-to-be-missed slide presentation of excellent websites to use for integrating technology tools into your teaching. Go through the slide presentation, and note which sites you know and which you want to check out. There's plenty here to keep you busy and to give you excellent ideas for sprucing up your teaching. With the summer coming, it's an excellent time to play, explore and think about what new tools you want to integrate into your teaching and how you might use them to spark student engagement and learning. Enjoy, and let us know what you find. Post a comment.
4 comments:
I have to admit that I had never heard of most of these sites, except for hearing about some of them for the first time in this course. I actually fell in love with the Little Bird Tales site.I'm thinking that next year I could use this site to have the kindergarteners create books in groups and send them to parents and other kindergarten classes in our district to read. How motivating would it be for them to see their artwork and hear their voices read the book. I wonder if will turn out to be as easy to do as it appears. We'll see. There were other sites that appear useful and interesting as well. Eventually, I hope to have more time to explore then further.
I have to agree with Janet, that I have not heard of most of these websites either. I think that it would be cool to have high school students who have mastered Powerpoint to try and navigate some of the other presentation websites. I also am thinking of looking more into some of the storytelling sites to possiblily use within a creative biology project.
Sadly, I have heard of none of these websites! While watching the slide show I came across two websites that caught my attention, Edudemic.com and Wordnik.com.
Edudemic is an interesting site that encourages teachers to use social media and technology in their classrooms in order to reach their students. The site offers numerous articles and videos on how to use twitter, Google, and blogging in the classroom. There are also various “easy read” articles such as, “Why Teachers are the New Principals” and “The Staggering Size of Today’s Social Media.” This would be a good website to check every once in a while for new and interesting articles.
Wordnik is an online dictionary. The layout of each definition is linear and extremely easy to read. Along with the definition, several examples are provided to show how the word is used in a sentence, an etymology feature at the bottom of each page clearly states the origin of each work, an easy to use thesaurus lists synonyms, and numerous pictures are provided as a visual. The website also provides are comment feature that allows students to comment on each word. I would direct my students to this website vs. dictionary.com simply because of the neat organization and accuracy of the words. Granted, I wasn’t able to look up every word! But, the few that I did look up seemed to have accurate information listed.
When you look at the list of these tools and the web 2.0 tools on http://cooltoolsforschools.wikispaces.com/ you can become very overwhelmed. This is how I feel sometimes with I start to look at all these. When I start to play with them, I think “Oh this could be good for….” But then I read a review and it states the issues and then I feel like I am going back to the drawing board. What I am really trying to say is that I am such an amateur with most of this programs and how to use them in the classroom. I realize after several times of looking through these tools I need to just take one and use it and see the positive and negatives about how they fair within a classroom. I do appreciate these sites available to find the list of web 2.0 tools.
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