digitalgoonies.com

www.piclits.com

Today I received an email from the folks at www.piclits.com (along with everyone else who attended CA CUE I guess!) telling about their Web 2.0 product. I decided to check it out, and really enjoyed working with it.

The idea is to select a photograph from their collection, then use the suggested words to write a sentence, a poem, a haiku, or whatever about the photograph. There is wide variety of photographs and each one has a range of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs specific to the photograph, as well as an assortment of universal words such as a, the, has, my, etc. Think of it as refrigerator poetry on steroids! Continue reading

Taking someone (say, students) on a tour of websites has never been easier. With this cool annotation tool, you add and sequence pages to be visited in the tour. The page opens in a frame with your typed message in the side frame. It’s better if you just take a look. I created this jog- a tour of 5 pages that provide free image resources for students and teachers.

Users advance to the next stop in the track by clicking on the Next (right arrow) button. The page will load within the given frame, keeping the navigation controls visible in a separate (left frame).

Just imagine the possibilities- take students on a self-paced tour through websites of your choosing. With your annotations, highlight important parts of the page or pose questions for students to answer with the information on each page.

www.voki.com

Talking avatars are a really great way to get your students’ attention really quickly. A Voki can be created by a teacher to introduce material or to give directions, or better yet, created by a student to share information. Students can let their Voki give a character description, a science vocabulary word, or the reasoning behind a math solution. There’s no limit to what a Voki can do!

Click the play button to hear my Voki! Continue reading

http://www.readthewords.com

Need a new gimmick to get students excited about summarizing concepts? Try this great website- Read the Words! In simple terms, you choose an avatar, customize it if you want, and make it speak. Pretty simple right? Try playing this one below- and move your mouse around to see how she follows with her creepy eyes.

The free version allows three concurrent files- none of which can be longer than 30 seconds. Thirty seconds? Any longer and that wouldn’t be much of a summarization would it?

Features:

• Logins are required
• Can create up to 3 avatar files concurrently
• 30 second limit
• Freemium model- can upgrade for more features