We are now beginning to enroll in three of our sessions open to the public. Two are in New York City and one is in St. Petersburg, Florida. Check out the details on our Web Site–Summercore.com Summercore is a unique experience, an intense, small group of educators learning about effective technology use with a large dose of humor thrown in on the side.
One of the best things about Web 2.0 is the ease with which they fit into the curriculum, ranging from Foreign Language to Lower School Reading. There always seems to be a way to incorporate these sites into a digital storytelling project, an exploration of verb tenses, or a strategy for summarizing skills learned in class each week.One of the two cute sites is blabberize. This is not the best site ever, but it can be used for many purposes. Simply upload a picture, draw a circle around the mouth, record a sentence or two and there you have it: a talking picture. Think of its uses: talking animals telling about their habitat, students describing a recent event, a political candidate voicing an issue. Try it. The second site is Bubbleply. This site allows the user to add pop-up bubbles to a youtube video. You can choose when and for how long the bubble will appear. Bubbles can include text and hyperlinks. Again, think of the many ways to use this site: a history class can annotate a famous speech, a French class can dub a commercial, a lower school reading class can add bubbles to a video of a class trip. The link feature makes this an even more powerful tool for upper school students, who can create links to websites, maps, and other resources.
As a recent convert to Delicious, I spent a good part of the vacation spiffing up my Delicious page of links. I have added many new links for curriculum integration content and many new resources for Biology, Chemistry, and History. For those of you new to Delicious, please use my links to explore the many possibilities Delicious offers, from sharing links with a colleague, to monitoring your student’s research, to finding great websites recommended by others. Here is the link to my main Delicious page, but then use the tags search to find those links that will be most helpful to your curriculum.
Foreign language teachers have so many possibilities open to them because their pedagogy mirrors the creativity allowed by Web 2.0. Voicethread is an obvious example; teachers can upload images for students to describe, and then students can listen to the responses of their classmates and their teacher. Voicethread can also be used for digital storytelling, so students can create their own narrated fairy tales, myths, and short stories.
Then there is Vozme, an amazing web site for Spanish teachers. Teachers or students can copy and paste or type Spanish text into the web site and then hear it read back to them. I am told by many Spanish teachers that the reader’s voice is terrific, absolutely perfect Spanish. Students can copy in segments of papers they are writing to hear them spoken aloud, or teachers can copy and paste an article from a Spanish newspaper, or a poem, or a section of a novel for students to read and listen to simultaneously. The sound files can be saved as mp3 to be downloaded into an ipod or e-mailed to others.
Yet one more interesting site is Overstream. Overstream allows students and teachers to add subtitles to youtube videos. Students can provide the foreign language text for a French or Spanish video, or they can mute the sound of a commercial, music video clip, or coming attraction of a movie to provide foreign language subtitles. Easy and very cool!
The abundance of cool web 2.0 sites can be overwhelming, so I thought I might highlight a useful dozen or so over the next few posts. For those of you unclear as to the meaning of web 2.0, these sites are designed for easy interaction, allowing you to create content on-line.One of the more popular sites is Delicious, a social bookmarking site. At first, I was not that thrilled with delicious, but as I used it more, I began to appreciate it. Here is a slideshow created by Sam Schalman-Bergen for Summercore:
First off, Delicious is a great place to back up all of your bookmarks; everyone backs up their files, but if you lost your laptop, wouldn’t you be crushed if you lost all your favorites from Internet Explorer or Safari or Firefox. Delicious provides that backup. You can then access your bookmarks(favorites) from any computer. But it is much more than a backup location: it is social bookmarking. So what does social bookmarking mean? First off, it means that you can share your bookmarks (all or just a selected group) with friends, family, colleagues and students. One classroom use of delicious is a group research project, allowing students or you to post good web sites. Students can write descriptions of the web sites they chose as part of a media literacy project.But there is even more. Social bookmarking allows you to view the bookmarks of others, so you can search for a specific topic to see if others have created a useful list, saving you the time.Then there is the advantage of tags. Tags is the web 2.0 word for categories. The advantage to normal saving of bookmarks or favorites within your web browser is that you can easily and quickly add multiple tags to each bookmark. Why is this good? Then you can easily find and sort your bookmarks. For instance, in my browser, I have a category for Web 2.0 sites, but in delicious, I can tag then as Web 2.0 plus education, plus integration, plus graphics, plus video, etc.I am now convinced that delicious is worth the time.
Google is constantly finetuning Google Earth, so each time you open the application and it connects to the GE server, you might find a surprise. The newest features is real weather info, terrific for those of you who do weather units in Science class. The Weather option has three layers: cloud cover in real-time, doppler radar, and weather and temperature conditions. This feature could also be useful at election time; imagine using the weather to predict voter turnout.
I am also constantly finding terrific KML overlays created by other users that can then be integrated into classroom content. My recent finds are one on the Bayeaux Tapestry, one on the spread of the Black Death, and another on population growth throughout the world. Two sites to find these files are The Google Earth Gallery and Google Earth Community Forums.
I worked with one teacher who came up with a great lesson plan for Ancient Egypt. We flew to the Ancient Pyramids and zoomed in on them in 3-D. Then she zoomed out to show the contrast between the desert location of the Pyramids and the fertile Nile Valley and to discuss the rationale for the location of the Pyramids. We then downloaded from the Google Earth Gallery a great KML file on King Tut’s tomb. The best part was that we planned the lesson in one forty minute meeting and she used in for the next class. She was thrilled.
As you probably have guessed, I am obsessed with Google Earth. I read Google Earth blogs, search for KLM files, and try to come up with lessons to integrate GE into the curriculum. One recent innovation is the addition of youtube videos geotagged throughout Google Earth. To explore this new layer, go to the Featured Content section and choose the youtube layer. Then when you zoom in, you will see links to thousands of videos. But be careful because the videos are of varying quality and some of them might be about Grandpa Sam visiting Paris.
Be sure to upgrade to GE 4.2 because GE has now gone into the skies; a new icon appears on the toolbar that changes Google Earth to Google Sky. You can view the sky with constellation names on, with tours of the solar systems, and many other cool features. The new version also allows embedding youtube videos into the pop-up balloons (for PC users only, so far); it also has a hidden flight simulator which is accessed by typing CTRL-ALT-A on a Windows machine and on the Mac, type Command+Option+A. I haven’t gotten the hang of using this yet, but the video below makes it seem very cool:
