Quizlet

Quizlet is an online interactive study guide. Teachers or
students can create their own study questions and flashcards to help prepare
for an assessment. Teachers can create the entire study guide and allow
students to access the website by telling the students the name of study guide.
Students can then go on Quizlet.com and find the study guide designed
specifically for their class. Quizlet also uses the terms and definitions to
create games and tests that the students can take using the information
provided by the teacher. Students just need to be told what the study guide
name was and they can search for it and find the study guide without even
logging in or having an account.

Quizlet does take a little time to get used to. However, if you take 20-30
minutes to play around with its capabilities one can quickly find out how
valuable Quizlet.com could be for a classroom. Students will enjoy the games
and find the practice to be very useful reinforcement. Quizlet is absolutely
worth the trouble of learning how to create the sets of flashcards. It has
excellent capabilities for both English and social studies. It can be more
difficult to set up good flashcards for mathematics, but it is still worthwhile
when it comes to learning vocabulary.

In order to play around with some flashcards I have made for
this class, please go to Quizlet.com and search ETAP - 638. Take your time and
try the tests and games. It is an excellent web 2.0 tool!

Animoto

Animoto

Main Features
Animoto is a tool online that can be used to make amazing slideshow presentations. It works great and is a lot of fun. Animoto allows you to put your pictures and video clips together, back it up with music, and use high definition graphics and text to put together a slideshow. One you put in all you want, Animoto puts it all together and makes it fit together nicely. It can be used for fun to show your friends, or it can be used in a professional setting. Everything created is unique to you.

Level of Difficulty
Animoto is relatively easy to use. All you need to do upload whatever pictures you would like and whatever music you want to go along with it. You don’t need a great deal of computer experience in order to use it. A background of PowerPoint can go a long way towards helping you work with Animoto.

Potential Application in the Classroom
Animoto can be a great tool for any teacher. Lectures and presentations can sometimes be boring for students, but Animoto helps things more exciting and engaging. It allows you to put pictures in great detail with music to help set the tone you’re looking for. Animoto will help you make it all flow together.

Conclusion
Animoto is a tool worth learning. It can be a great way to put information together in a fun and informative way, while also impressing people. What you create with Animoto is very impressive and very easy to create.

ZooBurst

ZooBurst (http://www.zooburst.com)

Main Features

ZooBurst is a free website (with the option of paying for upgrades) that helps you create digital 3D pop-up books. Images from the website’s clipart gallery can be added to the book or other images can be uploaded to incorporate into the book to “pop-up” off the pages. Each image and text has the capability of adding a clickable hyperlink. The book is capable of being inspected and rotated from any angle while building the book by the author and also while viewing the book by the reader. There is an expanded text feature for each page and also an audio recording feature to add voices and sounds. There is also a “webcam mode” to view the digital books which requires the reader to have a webcam. The experience of the “webcam mode” is referred to as “augmented reality” by zooburst.com. The images of the pages are superimposed with a screenshot of the viewer. The augmented reality mode allows the reader to interact with the images by using simple gestures to digitally turn the book’s pages. The digital pop-up books can be viewed on the website using a hyperlink (see my creation below), or embedded into other websites pages.

Level of Difficulty

This website is pretty easy to use and navigate through however it is extremely time consuming to create one book. Sign-up for the website is required in order to create books (but the basic account is free). The clip art, as far as the ones I chose from the website, were not the greatest quality images. I opted to upload several pictures instead of using the clipart available.

Classroom Application

I could definitely see a teacher using this website as an option for students to create a digital pop-up book to present research from a long term project. Since it only requires an e-mail and is free, it is easy to sign up for. The website also has a “classroom management” feature for teachers, which allows them to set up a protected and safe online environment for students where they can share usernames, passwords, personal information, etc. without the threat of online predators.

Conclusion

I tried building a book of my own on Taxonomy in Biology (click here to view it: http://www.zooburst.com/book/zb03_4edab1ea28a99). It was fun at first to play around with all the different features and to view the finished digital pop-up book product, but it became extremely time consuming. This website definitely encompasses several aspects of the “participatory culture” that we live in right now. “Technology has made it easy for everyday people to take media in their own hands; create, share, express themselves, archive, appropriate, remix and recirculate content” (Henry Jenkins). Overall, I would probably use this as an optional presentation outlet if students chose to utilize it.

Chime.in

www.chime.in

Main Features: Chime.in is a new social networking site that unlike Twitter, which is centered around following specific people, or Facebook which is focused on networking friends and families, Chime.in focuses on networking people of similar interests. Users can search set up a “Chimeline” which organizes their interests into a RSS like newsfeed which are made up of individual “Chimes.” These Chimes can be can be made up of 5000 characters and can contain attachments such as multimedia, outside links, or polls. Users can create their own Chimes as well which are organized in a blog like fashion based on the topic. One very interesting feature is that Chime.in will also give users 50% of the revenue it earns from selling advertisement on their profiles, thus providing a monetary incentive to chime in.

Level of Difficulty: Chime.in is still in a beta phase and everything including layout or features is subject to change. It feels like a Frankenstein mash up of Twitter, Facebook, a RSS feed, and a blog (but in a good way). It would likely take someone with an intermediate/high background in social networking a day or two to really get comfortable with all the different features and buttons on the website (I’m still learning my self). Once the site completes the beta stage, I don’t see Chime.in being any more or less difficult to use then any other social networking/media site such as Facebook or Twitter. For someone with basic computer/social networking skills however, Chime.in might be very overwhelming as there is just so much going on even on the basic dashboard screen. Hopefully this is something that can be addressed in time.

Potential Classroom Applications: I think Chime.in could potentially be much more impactful in the classroom than any social media to date. Teachers can set up classroom communities and allow for students and faculty to contribute and comment on each other’s chimes. As they site grows teachers could assign students different interests relating to the subject material. For example, a Participation in Government class could assign students to follow U.S Politics and contribute in a discussion about a current event.

Conclusions: I believe that this tool is definitely worth using as it allows for lots of different levels of interactivity. If you just want to keep up with your interests and follow a few things you can do that. Or if you want it to be, Chime.in could be your own personal blog (and potentially even get paid for it). A lot of times jack-of-all-trades applications end up mediocre, but Chime.in has the potential to really excel at everything it is trying to do.

Deviant Art

Deviant Art (deviantart.com) is an online community where artists can share their works in a community setting. People upload pictures and other forms of media to the website in order to share, comment, and get feedback from other artists and users alike. Unlike other forum based sites, Deviant Art allows artists to choose how their works can be used by others (i.e. allowed to be freely copied and used or not) giving a safer haven for copyrighted material. In the past, Deviant Art has held real life galleries which featured user submitted content. One specific gallery was a worldwide tour of user content.

For students, using Deviant Art will be fairly easy. Instead the difficulty will rest with the instructor. When implementing a forum based tool to a classroom restrictions come into play. There will be some inappropriate content on Deviant Art through nude pictures and other questionable content. As an instructor it is very important to set up an avenue where students cannot accidentally stray into said questionable content. Students will be able to see artwork from all walks of life and all methods of art expression. Analyzing different artistic styles and techniques can be a very useful application of Deviant Art. The applications of Deviant Art, although helpful, is a bit localized to an art based classroom so for all teachers to educate themselves would be frivolous.

Google Sites

Second Encyclopedia of Digital Tools Entry:

Google Sites, as its name implies, is part of the Google series of tools. It allows anyone to create and manage a website. Users are permitted to create a name for the site. If the site name is unavailable, Google will prompt you. They can also choose a template and theme. In order to ensure privacy, users can choose to allow everyone in the world to view the website or just people that they specify.

There is a home page, sidebar links, and options for adding images. There are many different additions one can add to the site. Also, there are multiple formatting options. For a new user, there may be too many. The colors, fonts, alignments, etc. have multiple options to choose from. One of the other nice benefits is that you can give access to edit to others.

My first experience with Google Sites was with a premade template. It was a bit difficult to navigate at first. The blank template seems a bit easier to use. If there were specific sidebar items and or layouts you want to use, I would recommend using a blank template rather than alter the premade templates. For a user with basic/intermediate computer proficiency, I would say that there is quite a bit of time necessary in order to get acquainted with this digital tool. There is not a lot of explanation or step-by-step processes.

I would say that this could be a very useful tool in a classroom. Teachers can collaborate easily since they can all have access to edit the website. They could provide links to useful references. They could manage a calendar and post assignment due dates. They could also have a section dedicated to discussions (student-student, student-teacher, parent-teacher, etc.).

I believe this is a tool worth learning, especially for teachers. It provides a great way to communicate with parents, display upcoming activities/projects, and organize resources available to students and parents.

For one of my other classes, we have begun to create a website using Google Sites. Here is the link to our website in progress: https://sites.google.com/a/albany.edu/assessments-in-education/

Evernote

Evernote



Main Features: Evernote is tool that serves as a digital notebook. You can save word documents, power point presentations, videos, and web links all in one place. An additional feature is that is portable. You can sync devises so that they can all access your Evernote account. This means if you find a good resource on your home computer, you can access it on your smart phone and school computer. You would then put a tag on the file so you can find it later (i.e. labeling a video ‘Science Experiment’). You can also easily share files with friends, colleagues, and classmates for collaboration.

Level of Difficulty: This tool is something that comes naturally to young people. For adults and children who are already used to working with Word documents, youtube, and other internet resources, there would probably be little to learn. It is only a matter of saving it in the Evernote tool. I think it might be more challenging for those who are not so media savvy, particularly older teachers. If they are struggling with more common tools like Excel and Outlook for email, it might be a tall task to learn and use Evernote.

Classroom Applicability: Evernote is the kind of tool that will make the spiral notebooks we grew up with obsolete. Students can take notes and share them with the class. One example on the website for Evernote has the teacher posting lecture notes to a place the class can view, therefore the students don’t need to focus on writing notes and can just focus on the lesson. It is a way for the teacher to disseminate information to the students, but also for the students to work together and share information they find.

Conclusion: This tool is worth learning because it is a step towards making education more interactive for the students. Instead of being passive recipients of information, they can find and share information just like the teacher does. As long as the resources are available for enough computers in the school, and the teacher has enough computer skills to use it, Evernote will be a great tool. I think everyone in this online class would have the ability to get the most out of it. However, I would not recommend this tool to teachers who are not computer savvy.