Just had my students use Glogster!

So just to update your on using Glogster with your students.....

My students were working on a project where they had the option of picking a movie and being a critic of it. Part of their presentation was that they had to create a movie poster to illustrate the movie they chose. Of course I decided to give them the option of using Glogster.edu to create their interactive poster. 

Here's what it looks like on the teacher view after your create an account for some of your students:

The posters that they created were awesome! Because of the neat interactive features available through Glogster, they were able to add music and video clips to their poster. 

Here are some Glogsters that my students just created:

AWESOME idea with Storybird!

Guess what?! I've been thinking about your telecollaborative projects and how students can work on projects together from all over the world. STORYBIRD has an awesome option of having students working collaboratively together to write a story! Students can share log in information and can go on Storybird to write parts of their story. One student could choose the illustration and the other student(s) could write the story. Or maybe they could work back and forth to write page by page and see how the story comes together. 

OR if you teach a world language, like maybe for example Spanish.....you could have students learning Spanish and students learning English work together to write a bilingual storybook. They could work together to decide the story, characters, plot, etc and then the could create a bilingual book. The students learning English could write 1 page in English and the students learning Spanish could write the page in Spanish. What a neat telecollaborative idea!! ;)

Storybird

One thing that I love to have my students do is create storybooks. It lends itself so well to Spanish because they can basically write a story about any topic or theme that we are learning about. I'm sure writing storybooks would work well in almost any subject as well! 

So I can across Storybird which is a free site that teachers can create an account with to have students write their own stories. A free teacher account allows you to add up to 3 classes and 75 students. There are of course paid options as well if your school/department has the funds. 

One thing that I liked best about Storybird is that it already has pre-loaded illustrations on it. You can search by a word and you will find illustrations that match that word and use them in your story, so students don't have to create all of the illustrations themselves. They can try to be very creative to write their story around the illustrations.

The other aspect of Storybird that I thought was neat was a teacher and pre-load or pre-choose a picture or pictures and have students use them to write their story about. This would be a really neat way to have all students write using the same illustrations and see all of the different ideas they have for their story and how creative our students are. 

Here's a story I made for my Spanish II students as a practice. 

How do you think you could use Storybird in your classes?

Had fun playing with Tagxedo!

So I decided to play around with some of the different options with Tagxedo. 

Like I mentioned before, you can insert a website address and create a Tagxedo picture based upon the words found on the site. Here's a Tagxedo I created from my own Web 2.0 Blog....

                                     
                                        And of course I used the fun star shape too!

If you wanted to have your students use Tagxedo as a tool during their research, they could input a website they have found and see what the main themes or ideas are. Here's a Tagxedo I created using the US Holocaust Museum's website that we were looking at last class:

              Have you used Tagxedo in your classes? Please share!

Tried Tagxedo?

So thinking about Sarah's post and talking about Wordle, it reminded me of another very similar website....Tagxedo! 

Tagxedo, like Wordle, allows you or your students to input words and create pictures and word clouds with them. Some differences with Tagxedo versus Wordle is:

-you can choose to have your words put into the shape of a picture rather than just a cloud shape in Wordle.
-You can input a website, blog site, or twitter feed and a Tagxedo picture will be created from what's on that site. ***Great idea with this!!! Remember, the more a word is inputed, the larger it will be in the picture...maybe you could have students input a website address to create a Tagxedo and look at which words are larger. Students will be able to examine what the main ideas/themes of the site are.

Check back soon...I'll be posting some examples!

My WORDLE examples from Sarah's Blog Post

So Sarah blogged about the tool Moodle and how you can use it to create pictures with words. I commented on her post and explained about a Flyswatter game I play with my students using Wordle. You can view my comment on her post here.

And here are my examples:

Do you think StudyBlue would be great for your students?

If you're not sure if StudyBlue would be good for your students, here are some other options that StudyBlue has to offer:

• o   The cards can be printed and/or emailed (sometimes I have my students do one of these options if I have them make flashcards as a homework assignment)
• o   The cards can be compiled into a quiz
• o   The cards can be compiled into a review sheet
• o   From home, student can log in through their Facebook account and Facebook will change their status to: “Don’t bother me right now, I’m studying!” so they are not distracted by friends! ;)

• o   There is a mobile app so students can study their cards from anywhere!!

It’s a pretty awesome site that I suggest you try out with your students. Who doesn’t find flashcards useful?!