Thing 40

Okay - what could be more fun than the Wheel of Food? This is one that is perfect for the indecisive family - and mine fits the bill every time! Now when someone asks "where should we go for dinner?" we'll be able to actually come to a decision. What a fun little app!

Visual Headlines: I can imagine that today's visual headlines (April 27) will be all about the swine flu! It was a pretty fancy interface, but moved very slowly. I wasn't impressed - although I think it had lots of possibilities. It just had too many little quirks to make me think I would ever recommend it. 

The "walkability" score of my neighborhood was incredibly low. I guess we don't have the things around here that score high. Kinda disappointing, because I think we have a beautiful walk.

I also tried out Google's history timeline, which I think fits in with these very well. It's a great way to get an overview of what was taking place during each decade, at least according to Time Magazine!

Thing 39

I think the digital storytelling and escrapbooking is fantastic!

I was familiar with voiceThread, and had shared it with the CMLE audience just last week. I think this is a website that is an incredible tool for schools. There are so many ways that this could be used - from sharing projects, to book reports, to understanding concepts and getting multigenerational comments from people. There is just so  much that can be done!

I also enjoyed looking at Scrapblog, Framento and Scrapo. To me these seem like they would be more useful for home use - but they would be fun at school as well. I am always encouraging teachers to post pictures of their activities in order to send them out to families. The bonus is that grandparents who live thousands of miles away can also view them - but most are so secure and nonthreatening for students. 

These are excellent tools - and I look forward to sharing more of them with my teaching staff. I thought VoiceThread would make an excellent conference breakout session, and a great "Techie Tuesday" item for my staff. I think the others would be great for teachers to learn, but would also be fun to share with parents in a community education program.

Thing 38

I found the applications i learned in this lesson to be incredibly useful and helpful for schools!

The first one I really spent time with and shared with all the media specialists in my district was wink - the way of compressing powerpoint slideshows. They can get so unwieldy - so this was very helpful.

Then I spent a lot of time looking at jing - and I was really excited about the possibilities with that one! I intend to create a lot of tutorials for my staff using it - because so many of them really want and need to be walked through all of the screen shots, and it is so easy to  do that by creating it in jing. What fun!

Skitch was also a blast to work with. I thought these were great - and I can really see a lot of applications for school use. I found them to be very easy to use and a person could put some very professional-looking tutorials together very quickly. Thanks!

Thing 37

Wow! It's been a while since I've gotten any work done on my "things". I played around with the fun digital storytelling tools a few weeks ago and then didn't get back to them to write about them. 

I love Animoto. I think I enjoy it so much because it is so intuitive and so very simple.  It's just so amazing how quickly you can put together something that looks so professional. I can't wait to share it at school!

I enjoyed playing with all of the great photo programs again. I'm not always sure how students could use these at school, because we are so limited on the number of cameras we have - but I have always thought it would be fun to have students create their own "year-end" video selecting the pictures they'd like to use from our folder of yearbook photos. I've never felt I could do this because of the strain on the network. I need to look into this and find out how network intensive it is. If it's not bad this would be a wonderful year-end project!