Saturday, October 13, 2012

Things 13, 14 and 15: Fun!

Personal libraries...

I have never used anything like this before, but of the three, I like Shelfari the best.  I like that you can add things about your edition of the book and even mark if you've loaned it out to a friend.  I haven't played with it beyond just adding a couple of books, but when I get the chance, I am going to try to catalog my personal library.  It'll be nice to keep track of things and easily see recommendations.  I like that you can link it with your amazon account too.

Image generators...

These would be so much fun with motivational and/or humorous sayings in Spanish.  When we do a unit of idiomatic expressions or cultural sayings, students could make a poster expressing the meanings and we could hang them around the foreign language department.


Screencasting with Jing...

I think that as the high school begins using Blackboard more and more this will be a valuable tool.  We will be able to upload lectures and lessons, but also students could be asked to use this to show that they've accomplished a certain task.  More than likely, students would just do the screenshot option, rather than a video, but teachers could definitely use the video option.  Currently, students in my level 2 class have a quiz website that they can go on for participation points.  They can either use the website to send my their progress report or if they do an activity without this option, I told them they could take a screenshot and email or print and bring it in to me.  This may help to simplify that.  One thing I really need for this tool is a microphone.

These tools are all so fun and useful, I'm beginning to get overwhelmed with all of the new free things in my toolbox!

Saturday, October 6, 2012

Reflection on photo and video tools

I really enjoyed this week's tasks, as working with these tools is really something I've never done before.  I take a lot of pictures (especially of my dogs) but I just leave them on my phone or camera and never do anything with them.  I really like the ease of Animoto (although my computer wasn't cooperating with the website for the longest time.. I ended up downloading the app on my phone and doing it that way, which was equally easy), and it came out with a very good quality product.  Currently, I view animoto as something I can use a lot personally, although I'm not sure how I will use it professionally.  For the classroom, I really like Photo Peach.  It's really easy to make vocab quizzes y for students to practice with and then embed them on blackboard.  I just wish the educator account was free.

Animoto video

Another of my dogs... I just happen to have a lot of pictures of them and not much else..


Photo quiz

This quiz was created with Photo peach:


Kitchen items on PhotoPeach

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Edited pic

Bella in a nutshell...


From Bella and Solomon

Practice pics

These are my dogs.  Bella is a border collie-lab mix and Solomon is a German shepherd.  This is my practice for embedding a slide show :)