Animoto

The latest Web 2.0 tool that i tried our was Animoto. Animoto is a simple web tool that makes a short video of uploaded pictures or short video clips. It is easy to use and the finished product looks very professional. You can share, link, embed, and/or upload your final product. I made a couple of videos which did not take much time at all and looked pretty good. In its free version the videos are short, only thirty seconds, so you are not likely to make the next Hollywood blockbuster and even as a way to share vacation photos or event photos, 30 seconds does not allow for many to be shown. However, "Pro" pricing is pretty cheap and there are both individual educator plans and school plans which are even more reasonable. If you take a lot of photos, Animoto would be a great tool to use to do something with them to share.

The best things about Animoto are that it is intuitive  and the finished product looks amazingly good for the amount of work that is required. It would be a great tool for younger kids or people with limited tech skills so that they could produce a short clip. It could also work as a stepping stone assignment to teach skills needed for a more involved movie project. It might be an alternative assignment for a student for whom making a whole movie from scratch was too difficult, for example a special education student in an inclusive educational setting could make an Animoto video whereas his peers might make an iMovie. I am going to encourage my students this fall to take pictures during their first week of school and we will use them to make short Animoto videos for them to share with friends and family and post on our website.

Enhanced Podcast

Our final project was to design a short enhanced podcast in iMovie. Overall I found this project to be much more challenging than anticipated. I am not a Mac user so this one one hurdle for me, even the delete key works differently on a Mac. iMovie is fairly intuitive but as with any complex program there is, or at least was in my case, a pretty steep learning curve. Among the many pitfalls I encountered were accidentally deleting an audio track, entering captions that did not save, not understanding why some recorded voice-over followed with a specific image while  other voice-overs the recording continued until stopped, and figuring out how to easily preview segments of the video without watching the whole thing from the start. I met most of these challenges, but not without a fair amount of effort. I will let you be the judge of how successful I was.

In order for me to have a movie making assignment in my classroom, I would need to watch many more instructional videos and practice making a few more movies. I encountered frustrations and I expect that some of my students would struggle with many more. Of course, others would do much better right from the start. I could an iMovie as a project to follow one in which students prepared  a PowerPoint presentation and another that required a screen-cast. The PowerPoint would help establish the concept of and practice with planning a presentation. The screen-cast would provide them practice with narration. A movie combines the two. I could also simplify the project a bit by having students use pictures that they had already take of friends,  family, etc., and make it more a video to tell about themselves rather than on some more complicated topic.

Critique of the two artifacts of Web 2.0 tools that you created

This past week I tried two new-to-me web tools, Quizlet and Tagxedo. Quizlet is an online flash card tool that allows you to both make custom cards, use others cards and will even  make suggestions for definitions for your cards. You may be thinking, flashcards, who want flashcards. Well I hate flashcards as much as anyone, but I was faced having some material to study and frankly my studying was not going well. Using Quizlet resulted in me spending more time studying and it also helped focus my studying on those terms that I did not know as well. So how did I do on the quiz? Well, there were some questions on content that I did not know to make flashcards for; I guess study aids are only as good as the student who uses them.

Whereas Quizlet was all about serious study Tagxedo was much more about creative fun. With this tool you create a word cloud in the shape of your choice. A word cloud is an image consisting of words on a particular topic. I used the UTK logo and words take from the UT FUTURE website. I was able to upload an image, pick custom colors and edit the words to only include those which had the most relevance. You can find a link to the result here. I am not the most creative person but I actually impressed myself.

So, will I recommend these to my students. I would suggest that they give each a try, Quizlet, if they are faced with terms that they have to identify and fit within the flashcard format. Tagxedo, would be good as a beginning of the year way for students to introduce themselves: they could upload an image and pick works that described themselves. It could also be the platform for a project that defined a concept, term, event, etc.

PODCASTING

If you are like me you have listened  to your fair share of podcasts while driving, lying in bed, or maybe even in the shower, but have you made one of your own. For class our assignment was to make a short 2-3 minute podcast on a topic of our choice using either Record MP3 or some other tool or application. I chose Audacity mainly because I had heard goo things about it and I was concerned that by trying to use a tool like record mp3 that I would spend to much time recording and rerecording trying to get a good finished product.

I made a good choice Audacity is a sophisticated program but is fairly intuitive to use. If you move a slider, click a mouse and are willing to spend some time you can create a remarkably professional sounding recording in not much time. The software allowed me easily edit our unwanted noises and when I struggled with the end of my podcast, I was able to append the initial recording, record three more takes and cut until I got something that I liked. On a few occasions I cut two sections a little too close to each other, but I was able to fix this by inserting two seconds of silence(just a few mouse clicks were required. The ease of editing actually created a minor problem for me. I became a bit obsessed and really spent more time on the podcast than I had originally intended.

Audacity provides support for the product at their website and through a forum. Additional help is readily available on YouTube. The product is free and open source, but donations are encouraged. Would I use this for students. Perhaps. I think I would be more inclined to have them spend time on a screen-cast or a movie; these would produce a finished product that would be a bit more interesting and they would get practice scripting, task analyzing and producing a finished product with either of these projects just as they would with a podcast. Using a podcast and an alternative form of summative assessment might be interesting. I may give this a try.

Here is an example of an instructional video that is available on YouTube.

Return of Social Bookmarking

Well I have decided to enter the 21st Century of bookmarking using Diigo. The picture to the left explains quite a lot of of the appeal. With Diigo, I can access my links not just on any computer or any browser but on any of my devices and I have a lot: desktop, notebook, iPad, Nexus 7 Android tablet, Note 2 smart phone, home computer,and even an old iPod that lives in the bedroom. No matter what device, I have my links and also articles that I have saved to read later. Diigo doesn't seem to by syncing automatically on the Android devices but this may be a change I need to make to settings, but after a manual synch everything is there.

So how does this compare to Scoop.it!, which I tried earlier. For me the plain look of Diigo is easier to read. And while I don't anticipate adding lots of links each day, the limit of 10 scoops per day on Scoop.it! was a concern(you can add more if you pay). I hate adopting a technology, app, web tool,etc., that has this typo of limitation. I do like that Scoop.it! sends a daily email with interesting links based on the topics that I hav curated, but sorry Scoop.it! I'm saving them in Diigo, for now. I am not certain that I will take advantage of the annotating features that Diigo provides but it is something to play around with. Diigo offers a educator plan for free which can have linked student accounts.In theory, I could find links for students to read, highlight and annotate the most important information, and make these easily accessible to students. If I try this I will post the results.

Here is a link to a review of the new Diigo.

Poll Everywhere

I am having a hard time getting past my initial impression of Poll Everywhere. It is a really cool web tool. People love polls and what could be better than a poll that shows you the results almost instantaneously. When I gave my class presentation I was a but surprised that others saw a number of drawbacks. Here is a table that summarizes some of the concerns that were shared.

Plusses ++++++++++++	Minuses  --------------
Anonymous responses may encourage participation	…but anonymous responses may not lead to the most thoughtful  responses
Results appear quickly	…but texting takes some time
Great tool for formative assessment	…but must be planned ahead, it takes too much time on the spot to set up  poll
Basic polls are free	…but those who use it regularly will want to buy the premium features.

I was reminded that public school teachers are under tremendous pressure to fit a required curriculum into their allotted class time. Spending too much class time on a poll could be counterproductive, especially since some simple formative assessment can be done with raised hands. I imagine that once both students and teacher became more used to the polls that this activity would be less time consuming.

Poll Everywhere would make a really neat brainstorming tool, you can set up a poll to accept any response and this would probably take no more time than alternative methods. The tool could also be used as an activity for students to do at the beginning of class, as they are getting settled. In this way the teacher could check for understanding from homework or perhaps use the poll results to jump start class discussion. I find with my students that I think I have communicated clearly some important information but while they may have listened they did not commit it to memory. I am going to try using polls to promote better retention.

By the way, in case you are wondering how to do a table easily in blogger, sorry you can't. You have to make it in a word processing program and paste the code; here is a link that shows how. One unfortunate thing is that you cannot see what you have pasted in the compose view in blogger, it will only show up when you view the HTML.

WikiSpaces

Our class is using wikispaces as a way to share content and build a class website. Wikispaces has the goal of providing online space that is simple to use, supports a community of contributors, is open and useable for everyone, and like most companies, they also have the goal to provide helpful  and "crazy amazing" customer service.

Wikispaces can designed to fulfill many functions: a knowledge resource, a safe place for social networking, a place for collaborative and project based learning, a space for online or remote learning; it also has classroom management features. Editing pages is fairly straightforward. At the top of each page that you create there is an editing bar like any word processor. There are also widgets that allow you to add additional content and increase the functionality of the pages, for example you can add a calendar, polls, or maps. Our class site is exists to host instructional pages on Web 2.0 tools.Each tool has a separate student constructed page and everyone edits the homepage. Typically signing up is by email but teachers can sign students up who don't have emails making wikispaces good for students in younger grade.

Overall this has worked well with one problem when more that on e person is working on a page things get a bit complicated. You have to be careful when you exit and save that you don't discard changes that the other person has made/is making. In this way wikispaces is not as good as Google docs, where multiple people can work at once and changes are saved all the time.

I will need to spend some more time with wikispaces to see if it is a tool that I want to use. There are a lot of ways to collaborate online and some of the features overlap with the standard course management system that is already in place. However, it is user friendly and has a lot of  features.

Here is a webinar on creating wikispaces.