Virtual Field Trip Using Google Maps

The third graders at my school go to Blennerhassett Island in the spring for their end of the school year field trip (weather permitting). The year my daughter was in third grade, it rained for a week and the trip was cancelled due to flooding on the island. I believe the same thing happened the next year too. I decided that a virtual field trip would be a good prep tool for the trip to the island and a better than nothing trip for those who get flooded out. I am working on making the VFT into Google Web pages, but it is still a work in progress that I plan to have finished before the actual field trip. You can find the completed  Virtual Field Trip on Google Maps.


View WCPC 3rd Grade Field Trip in a larger map

Thanksgiving Proclamation - Which President Said What?

As I was looking for Thanksgiving activities for students at my school to do, I noticed that there are Thanksgiving Proclamations that date back to George Washington. I decided to do Wordles of three proclamations to see if teachers and students could figure out which president gave the speech in each of the Wordles. The choices are Barack Obama, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

Here they are...

I sent a Word document that had these Wordles on it to the fourth grade teachers at my school. They are going to copy them off and put students in small groups to discuss them. When they have had enough time to talk in the groups, then the groups will report their guesses back to the class during a class discussion. Did you guess the speech givers correctly?

George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama

Tagxedo

Voicethread

I have tested Voicethread, but I can't get it to embed on my blog. Here is the link to the test that I did with my daughter, Susie, Theresa's test Voicethread. I had to do the screen captures then upload them. Susie did the narration from a script that I wrote, while I drew the arrows during the presentation. Voicethread can be very interactive. If you watch and listen to some of the ones on the site, you will see various uses for the tool. My favorite is when students do book reports using the tool, then other students comment back to the student on the site. I found it easy to use, and my daughter enjoyed using it.

Glogster Demo for Teachers

Prezi

My newest test was of Prezi. You don't have to do anything fancy, like the pro's (embed videos or images). You can also save and download your presentation to present it offline. Nothing like having a backup in case of emergency! It isn't difficult to use, but you do need to get used to how it floats to the next spot on your path, so you don't intermix and mingle your presentation content. Overall, I loved it and will use it again and show it to students and teachers.

Survey Pirate

Survey Pirate is no longer available. : ( I found this free online tool to use to conduct online surveys easily. I think it would be a great way to find out how much students know about a topic before and after it is covered in class. It might be a little more fun and less stressful for them to take than a pre or post test on paper. Here is a sample of a short survey on Graphing Vocabulary: Graphing Vocabulary Survey. The sample survey that I created could not be used to grade specific students, but rather would be used to give the teacher an overall idea of how well the students are understanding the information being covered in class.

CoverItLive.com

Testing Cover It Live to see how or if it really works. I should be able to start posting and receiving comments in the CoverItLive window kind of like an IM. This could be fun in the classroom. One way to keep the students awake! I totally enjoyed playing with this, and it worked like a charm! Sorry I posted all the pics from their default humor folder. I planned on deleting them, but I couldn't find a way to get them out once they were there. I liked the poll feature. You can turn it on and off and back on again. If it was in the fall, you could post the latest football scores and time left in the game. You should be able to live stream yourself, although I didn't try that. I did get a live stream to work from a streaming site, but I don't think that I would use that in class if all of my students were on computers too. It could be a good way to communicate with another class elsewhere though. I also posted some music from a default folder. It all seemed to work like it should. It was easy to use too. I could choose whether to post viewer comments or private message them to respond. I really liked using this tool!

GoAnimate

GoAnimate has a site that is reviewed by the company to keep it from containing inappropriate content. The site is Domo.GoAnimate.com.
I found a short video on the site that tries to explain WWI in 2 minutes and 5 seconds. I think this tool has real potential!
DomoNation.com: World War One by Alex Maiola


Like it? Create your own at DomoNation.com. It's free and fun!

Blabberize

I've seen this before, but due to distraction from what I really should be doing right now...I ran into this Web 2.0 tool again. I want to make sure that you see this media wiki page that demonstrates the tool, as well as an example of it in use.

How Well Do You Really Know Google?

I ran into this Glogster while reading Tech & Learning. I didn't know that there were so many different types of Google searches that come up with results in so many different formats. I'm sharing the Glogster below that was on the Tech & Learning blog. You can find a larger version of the Google Glogster by clicking on the link to the Tech & Learning blog link.