"The Wizard of Apps" By Joyce Valenza discuss numerous useful applications for students, teachers, librarians, or anyone wanting to utilize the internet in a helpful and productive way.
Glenda the good witch discuss finding applications online that help Dorthy and her fellow friends to explore and collaborate digitally.
Being a good digital citizen...
What does that mean? Ethical Citizenship and Digital Footprint - People search tools like pipl, can show what images are available on people along with, information from social networking sites. This is important because potential admission officers for schools or people hiring individuals can use this information to find out more about individuals (123people) another site, thatsnotcool show videos that help students discuss privacy online issues.
Interacting with intellectual property means using copyrighted material under fair use... Creative Commons licensed materials means that people can share copyrighted work, allowing people to rework the copyrighted images while the original copyrighter still gets credit. Websites like flickr have creative commons search portal. The most liberal 'attribution only license' - means if you cite an image, you can remix it, legally. Some other helpful websites for interacting with copyrighted material are compfight, flckrstorm. When dealing with works cited pages bibme, citationmachine, easybib all aid in the citing process.
Helpful research applications... Researching various topic online can be overwhelming but sites like researchguide, researchwikis (mind maps, research content collecting), and pathfinder help in the research process. Students reflect in wikis on their research and teachers can see where the student's need help. Researching involves critical thinking, problem solving, decision making, and triangulation, and can be made simple through these research apps.
How to use google more powerfully... wonderwheel in google search shows related concepts and allows the exploration of other ideas related to the original ideas, timeline, google squared, and creating a google custom search are a few of the various ways to use google in a new and more productive way.
Some other helpful search engines are wolframalpha (useful in math and science learning), wiki, surchur (can search across social networks), and rss feeds like ebsco.
GIGO stands for "garbage in, garbage out"... Triangulation is developing a filter for "garbage" One website to receive negative publicity as a scholarly source is wikipedia, but it is not always a bad source, it is good for breaking news and can be a good place to start for a basic understanding of the topic being researched. PLN - personal learning network - easywhois (helps to determine where certain information is coming from) Finding primary sources in the past has become a little difficult over time but a site like demotix (organizing and gather new journalism) lead you to the direct source. Another way of having a primary source is to create surveys, these can be created in googledocs.
A database widget site is provided by nytimes widgets (where you can choose from various categories and feeds), along with netvibes (which is devoted specifically to widgets).
Digital story telling portals held aid in creativity and innovation: websites like digitales, Xtranormal,Voicethread, Goanimate, Bitstrips, Wordle, PrimaryAccess (links to database of artifacts), Blogster (poster-like digital storytelling).
Communication Collaboration...
Presenting in front of large audience can be intimidating but when given the right tools it can be exciting. Online global collaboration helps with communication. (can share slides and tools) Slideshare is a site where people can share various slides and tools with one another. Another great network is called skypeanauthor this brings the authors into the classroom digitally. TED is a great place to find video resources and also provides great models for presenting in the 21st century. Googledocs has templates in an archive that help students and teachers collaborate together at anytime of the day and anywhere in the world. Diigo is a social bookmarking website that allows students and teachers to tag, share, and annotate various links.
Another recommended websites for teaching and learning : ala.org
To view the "Wizard of Apps" in slide form it can be found at Slideshare
When citing and research various topics for school, I have found myself overwhelmed with too much information and not the right information at that. Where do you go to find it? Websites like Googlify, googlesquared, and surchur will be incorporated into my searches when researching information online. I loved this video because it will not only help my students in the future, but it is going to serve it's purpose in my life right now. This whole video was dedicated to bringing awareness to useful internet applications. I don't think I will have such a hard time navigating from place to place in the future, not with so many helpful apps.
In my classroom I want my students to understand how to access certain information safely, efficiently, and productively. I will definitely introduce this video to them and share these links with other teachers in the future. Even though my field is in Art part of my planned curriculum is to have the students write a paper over one of their favorite artists and present. Well with them applications I can share with the students and this can help aid them with this assignment along with various presentations and papers in the future.
Wordle is a fun website that lets you create word clouds. It could be used in numerous ways, like digital storytelling or brainstorming. You can change the size and fonts of different words in the word cloud you create. I went to wordle.net and created my own word cloud about Giant Pandas!
No comments:
Post a Comment