Week 2 Webinar Wednesday

This week in class we begun talking about tools that we can use to help educate ourselves about some of the software (and free at that) that is available around us.  The task at hand was to find a webinar that discusses technology in the classroom.  The one that really grabbed my attention as I have a short attention span was the one titled “30 Tools in 50 Minutes” http://tlc.simplek12.com/h07321od  I was intriqued that’s a lot of tools in not a lot of time.  The webinar was hosted by Simple K 12 and the speaker was Steven Anderson.  Steven has a blog that I quickly became a follower to because there is an abundance of great information centrally located.  Here is his blog Blogging About The Web 2.0 Connected Classroom   

I know you are all desperately waiting to hear what sort of tools could Steven possibly tell you about in 50 minutes.  I am happy to accommodate you.  They are broken down by types and most include a little synapsis on how they would be useful to you.  

For locating images to use in the classroom you could use.

• Include Compfight, searches flicker for images www.compfight.com  for images that are allowed to use in the classroom.  Also for creative comments.
• Flickr for storage as well as searching.   Limited to uploading number per month on free account.  Group poll for pictures
• Big Huge labs:  Upload a picture and create it into another thing example of motivation posters, magazine covers, newspaper, comic book covers www.bighugelabs.com
• Aviary is a photo manipulator, photo editor free google product.  Great basic photo editor
• Picnik also another free photo editor

Audio/Visual Tools

• Vocaroo is a voice recording.  Click record, can download and email it to yourself.  Could record your comments for an essay so the student can hear your comments.
• Jing www.techsmith.com/jing/  if you want to download the videos you do have to pay but the screen can record everything you have done on the screen.  Great tool to use for missed assignments.  Screen casting
• Skype audio/video calling and screen sharing.  Having authors skype into the classroom.
• Voki is a character animation that can be on a website.  Will play back your voice and animate to one another  www.voki.com  introductions, and about me pages.

Collaboration

• Linoit  cork board canvas.  Can post on facebook, people can add and put a sticky note to add their own personal answer.  Used for brainstorming a lot
• Wiki and pbworks  great to create student accounts.  Not meant to be static.  Allow anyone to edit. How to implement in the classroom?  Had a poetry project where each student had a different poet.  4 kids had same poet all used the same wiki and each added to it and collaborate through the wiki
• Ning Educators PLN  forums, groups, use in classroom to live chats
• Google docs, everyone can work on the same document at the same time.  All students are able to work simultaneously.

Chat and Backchannel

• Today’s meet  a chat room to use in conjunction to meetings give to participants type questions answers reponses  all students watch a video, teacher posts questions during video, students are able to answer them during the video 
• Tiny chat is video chatting.  The program is browser based.  Can give a presentation

Presentation tools

• Creative commons is a license to put on yoru work that allows others to use it resources can get murky in what educators can use.  To share their work to make it easy for others to see and use
• Sliderocket
• Very user friendly, and the results are very professional, powerpoint on steroids. Lots of different templates to utilize.  Create and upload.  Can set up collaborators to use the same presentation.  All members of the class can work on it simultaneously.
• Prezi
• Love or hate it.  Presentations look great but it’s a free presentation creator. 
• Livebinders.com
• Upload documents, presentations, interactive interface.  All links organized by tabs

Mindmapping

• Mindmeister.com
• Exportable, history, hyperlink easy straightforward
• Lovelycharts three d, characters can be used
• Poplet free account can only create five at a time. 

Essential tools, really have to have in your toolkit

• Embedit.in  if the user doesn’t have the software, you are able to still use the tool by embedding it in.
• Zamzar used to create one type of document into something else.  Trying to convert keynote to powerpoint.  Windows media files to mp3s
• Twitter find out information, share them.  Getting started with twitter live binder.  Tons of webinars on how to use twitter
• Readitlater  readitlaterlist.com
• Can be used on everything phones tablets and computers.  Instead of using bookmarks can use
• Diigo has an educator account that allows to keep track for students.  Share bookmarks with people.  You can follow others peoples bookmarks can also be linked to post to your only blog.
• Google calendar, can share your calendar with anyone. 

By watching this particular webinar, I learned a great deal.  There are constantly tools evolving and out there to help make my life easier.  Instead of having to spend endless hours searching I now have a great place to begin utilizing these tools.  Now as educators and future educators we all know there is always a rubric and of course a learning outcome for an assignment.  Based on this particular assignment and the knowledge I gained by completing it I would say it met the following:

• Evaluate and reflect on emerging tools and trends by reviewing current research and professional literature
• Learn ways to promote student reflection using collaborative tools to reveal and clarify students’ conceptual understanding
• Learning Outcomes

By listening to the webinar and reading over the speakers blog, it was easy to meet.  Because there was a whole topic included on collaboration, I was given numerous ideas on how to implement this in the classroom setting.  Such as working on a wiki assignment together and using Voki to create an animated fun character to break the ice when students are getting to know one another. 


Welcome to our future Future Classroom