iMovie

Here is my iMovie! The process was fun but time consuming to get all the editing just right. I really like using iMovie, and would love to use this tool in the classroom!

Using Excel

Using Excel was challenging for me. I think it would be a good tool for students, but I don't see how I could use it for quizzes unless we had computers in the classroom, or traveled to a computer lab to take a quiz. The formulas were complicated because you have to get them just right, and I did find this a little frustrating. For me, excel was just a little tedious, but I do think it could be useful in some situations. The first image is the quiz the students would see, and the second image is the answer sheet on page 2 of the excel spreadsheet.

Google Forms

After learning about Google Forms, I think it would be a great tool to use in the classroom. I would be great for online quizzes, surveys, or just getting to know your students on the first day of class. I think that students could also use this for projects involving surveys where they can get the whole class to take a survey and gather information.

Using Inspiration

I really liked using inspiration and I think it would be very useful for both the teacher and the student in a classroom setting. Inspiration is a good way to display main concepts and sub-concepts with pictures to help students make connections. For the teacher, diagrams could be used to hand out to students or hang in the classroom as a study guide or an aide for a book (character list, etc.). For students, Inspiration would be a good way to review for a test, or a good assignment to turn in for a project to make sure that the student is understanding the main concepts in the course. The only issue I have would be that it may be difficult to spend an extended amount of time on Inspiration at school. If the class period is only 50 minutes long, the students only have that long to work on the project because they
probably wouldn't have Inspiration on their home computer. Other than that, I think it is one of the most useful tools we have learned about so far. Here's my example of using Inspiration to help students understand some of the main concepts in relation to Ancient Greece:

Wordle and Tagxedo

I thought that Wordle and Tagxedo would be cool to use in the classroom for posters and parts of class projects. After using both of them, I definitely like Tagxedo better because of the fact that you can change the shape. I think that Wordle would be good for younger children because it's more simple, and Tagxedo could be used for middle or high school students. I don't think that I would be able to grade one of these word clouds, but it could be a fun activity for students and a tool for teachers to help emphasize important words and themes in different topics.

Twitter and Delicious

After hearing about Twitter and doing a presentation on Delicious, I see how both could be used in the classroom. I thought it would be a good idea to make a classroom twitter to keep students connected. Each student could use their own Twitter account to keep up with classroom activities, and maybe if the student wasn't able to attend class that day, they could ask the other students on Twitter what they had missed. Delicious would be a good tool for group projects where groups could research and share links to websites with one another. I feel as though these websites would both be better suited for Middle School to High School students.

Storybird and Smilebox

I really liked learning about storybird and smilebox. I can see how both would be very useful in the classroom in their own ways. Smilebox would be good for things like class scrapbooks and slide shows, and storybird would be good for younger students. In a high school history classroom though, these two websites may not be that useful. They both seem like they would be better fit for a younger classroom, although smilebox maybe useful for a slideshow, or something of that nature if powerpoint wasn't available.