Glogster

Delicious

We learned about Delicious today! Delicious is a web 2.0 tool that allows you to bookmark sites using tags. These tags will help you find a specific site quickly. During my exploration of Delicious, I had difficulty with the initial setup. Creating an account on Firefox did not work. Once my account was created, bookmarking was extremely easy.

I will have computers in my classroom. By having class websites bookmarked on Delicious, the children will be able to access sites quickly and without having strong typing skills.

Next time, I will try to anticipate any technological problems the class may experience during my explanation of Delicious. I will also be comfortable with the site so that I can effectively lead the class through the site.

Picnik

While learning about web 2.0 tools, I specifically worked with picnik which is a tool for editing photos. I was successful in editing photos with the free applications yet there were certain applications that required a paid membership. This was frustrating in that I could not fully edit photos. On the other hand, it was nice that so many applications were free.

I could use this in a classroom to create a picture book to share with parents at open houses, illustrate short stories and essays with creative images, or make postcards to send to relatives, pen pals, etc.

Next time, I will have multiple pictures loaded to my desktop and will have a specific purpose in mind. I will not just be playing with the pictures, but I will have a specific project in mind. This will allow me to test the potential of picnik for future classroom projects.

Wordle

This site is truly amazing! I enjoyed working with it and enjoyed the end result. This is a new and creative way to show the different words in a story, children's names in a class, or even let each child pick a word that is their favorite. It is easy to use in that you just type the words in and it spits out a fabulous model! You even get to pick the format and coloring of the words. The largest words are the words that are used the most often. They gradually get smaller as they are used less frequently. I would not change a thing about the way I used wordle.