Thursday 21 July 2011

Reaching Digital Natives

If you want to teach them, first you have to reach them...

Voice Thread in the Classroom

AYQ9ZTS6YJGT  I have been playing around with voice thread this week. We have started using it for Today’s number in maths just to get us started. Kids seem to be responding quite enthusiastically towards it.
Here are a few ideas for using it in the classroom

Twittering at School

Some schools  use services such as Twitterfeed, EasyTweets or HootSuite to pipe their existing RSS feeds into their Twitter accounts, so that every time something new shows up in the feed, it automatically tweets the headline and link to the full story. This is a simple way to have news, events and blog posts automated.


                                                            twitter

ZooBurst – A quick and easy literacy integration

A great Web 2 tool for teachers to use with their students is ZooBurst. This tool allows the students to create their own 3D pop-up books. When students start building their own books they can choose any angle and also rotate the book. They can make objects on the page clickable so that readers are able to read more about them. They can place speech bubbles on the characters that pop up when it is clicked and make them talk with each other. Children can retell a story or write their own stories.
A basic account is free. A free account entitles the individual user to make 10 books, upload your own characters (PNG or JPG files), use characters from the clip art gallery, arrange characters in 3D space, use character speech bubbles, customise backgrounds and have privacy options (e.g. private, public or password protected books).