Thing #7

This was a difficult Thing!! It wasn't difficult because I didn't know how to work any of applications, but because I had used so many of them. We create Wordles and Glogsters often in my class. For my 11 Tools I had to create a Voki. Last semester, in Education Applications, I created a video with Animoto. And so you see dilemma. However, I had not heard of WordSift before. I like it a lot and I actually "sifted" my journal entry that I wrote today with my students. Like Wordle, I have a hard time sorting out how this would require higher level thinking with my students. The only thing I can think of is for them to enter text from something they are reading and then creating a WordSift. From there, I could have the analyze the words that are the largest since those are the ones repeated most frequently and why the author chose those words to use multiple times. I'm going to have to think a little more on how to apply this.

The other tool I had never used before was Flipsnack. This one was way cool and I enjoyed it a lot. I started writing journals with my kids because one day, I was bored at hall duty and I visited my brother's classroom website. What I found there were a collection of journal prompts and his responses to them. It was brilliant and his entries were touching. I went through each of them, and got an idea. I decided that I, too, would respond to the prompts and compile all of them into a scrapbook for my mom and dad for Christmas. The finished product was amazing. However, the scrapbook is huge and it would be nice to have a digital version to share with family and friends, so...I made a Webber Journals Flipsnack. I'm so excited to find a new presentation tool for my kids. This is just another option they can have for presentations and projects. It also makes notes interactive which is good because we all know how much they HATE taking notes.