Surveys. It seems we’re getting a lot lately, and the process can be tedious at times. However, the feedback can be valuable, especially if we ask well-crafted questions and receive honest answers. Surveys can also give us the feeling that we have people interested in what we are doing, a verifiable audience whose opinions can impact the way we perform in the future.
Fo.reca.st is a free survey-creation site with customizable features that give your survey a unique look. You can make a multiple choice, multiple question survey with no limit on responses, ideal for surveying multiple classes or opening up your survey to the whole school. The results are displayed in a bar graph accessible from your account.
Fo.reca.st could be a tool for informal assessments on content mastery or students’ prior knowledge of a subject. But students don’t have to test only their own knowledge with these surveys — they could also evaluate the work of their peers. Paired with other Web 2.0 technologies, e.g. slideshows from Slideshare, fo.reca.st surveys could be used to evaluate digital projects.
With Web 2.0 technologies, students can produce work for the world to view, and the world can give some feedback.
Students create presentations all the time, sometimes well, sometimes very badly. We often attempt to set the bar high through modeling our own work or displaying exemplary projects other students have completed. But what happens after your students leave your classroom? Too many students often forget. Slideshare, paired with your blog or website, can reconnect students to a solid visual standard anytime they access your online resource.
Slideshare is a web-based application which allows you to upload presentations to the web and then display them to as many or as few people as you would like. If you would like to keep your audience small, you can e-mail individuals a secret web address where they can view your show. Or, if you’d like to broaden your audience, you can paste your show into your website or display it to the members of the Slideshare community. Students can review your presentation anywhere they can access the internet.
Used in your classroom, Slideshare may actually increase your students’ engagement by giving them an authentic audience. After certain Internet safety measures are taken, posting student work on the web can encourage students to produce works they can take pride in, and it enhances the perception that correct citation is an issue of honesty, not simply a requirement of the rubric.
Here’s an example of one publicly available presentation from Slideshare, embedded into this blog:
Here’s an interesting way to communicate concepts to students even after they’ve left your classroom.
Sketchcast.com is a site devoted to the creation and sharing of sketches, with or without audio. A great feature of this site is that each sketch you create is given an embed code, so you can attach it to your blog, wiki, or website. Share sample problems with students, record concept-mapping instructions, illustrate a lecture, and more.
Teachers with interactive tablets or SMART Boards will find this technology most accessible, but a successful sketch can be created with only a mouse. For the example below, I used my touchpad to demonstrate simple division.
WEB 2.0 is all about sharing, collaborating, and receiving feedback. A great resource out there for you to check out is VoiceThread. Voice thread is a site where you can upload pictures, movies, pdf’s, and presentations, and add your own verbal and written comments to them, for the public, or a select few to see. The fun, and power of this site, is that others viewing your upload can listen to your comments and add their own. So what does this have to do with the classroom? Rich story telling with real pictures and the author’s voice. Group collaboration and sharing. Student/teacher conferencing over presentations or individual documents. The nice thing is that the Pro version, usually $30 a year, is free for educators and gives you unlimited use of the site. As for security, you can select to moderate any posting you make and your uploads can be kept private to just your group of friends, in this case, your classroom. Take a minute to check it out and feel out the potential in your classroom when everyone has a voice. Here is my posting Feel free to add your comments to it.
Here is a posting by a student. It is a report on black bears. What a great way to incorporate media into everyday projects!
If you enjoyed Musicovery, you’ll probably enjoy Deezer as well. You can’t download the files, but it will stream and… It’s Legal!!!!! It was created in France and has evidentially come to an agreement with copyright holders. Read more about this on their press release.
Everyone likes free. Problem is, a lot of free programs out there just aren’t up to the challenge of being useful in the classroom or having the quality to be worth our time. Here are a couple, though, that are more than worth the time of a download!
Ever find yourself in need of a map of the United States? France? How about Iraq or Egypt? Ballwin or Chesterfield? Google Earth is your one stop tool for anyplace on the globe. With powerful features like zoom and 3D, give your students a whole new view of their world and the world around them. Curriculum uses? Seeing the correlation of resources and populations, measuring distances between real world destinations, looking at your local community, exploring the settings for stories or their authors, looking at landforms of the world, and now you can even explore space with the new sky view! Never buy another wall or book map again.
Finally a painting program that actually allows you the experience of painting! Art Rage 2 is an incredibly powerful art program that allows you to work with a wide variety of mediums on an array of surfaces while maintaining the look and feel of the real thing. Paints actually mix instead of overlaping, pressure and saturation can determine individual brush strokes, canvas choices effect appearance. While the full version costs 25(and is probably worth it!), the free version offers more than enough options to show off your student’s creativity and talents. Imagine giving your student a dry paint brush and having them paint on a Smart Board! Import images and trace over them with pastels before removing the original image and being left with your interpretation of the original. Can you say Finger Paints!
Now here is a great tool for your visual learners. Sketchup is a 3D modeling program that allows you to easily create shapes and other objects in well, 3D. Sure you could use it in a design class or architecture, but how about math? Studing area, volume, perimeter, angles, ratios, perspective, geometry in general? Bring life to your lessons by creating and modifying objects or having your students present their own interpretations of what they have learned. Measurements are in metric and standard form.
Copyright is an issue that we, as educators, face on a regular basis. Copying pictures from the web to be used in projects and in the classroom can end up with unknown violations. The website, Pics4learning.com, offers free, copyright-friendly photos and is intended to provide images for use by students and teachers in an educational setting. The original photographers of each image retain the copyright to these images and have graciously allowed their use in the collection.
This week’s link comes directly from Google in the form of Picasa.
Picasa is a free software download from Google that helps you:
* Locate and organize all the photos on your computer.
* Edit and add effects to your photos with a few clicks.
* Share your photos with others through CD, email, prints, and on the web.
This site will allow you to create a free 30 second video that you can share with friends complete with soundtrack. Here’s one I created with 15 pictures that were on my computer.
If you make one and want to share, make a comment so we can see what you’ve done.
Surveys. It seems we’re getting a lot lately, and the process can be tedious at times. However, the feedback can be valuable, especially if we ask well-crafted questions and receive honest answers. Surveys can also give us the feeling that we have people interested in what we are doing, a verifiable audience whose opinions can impact the way we perform in the future.
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