The Big Question

Toondoo is a great online comic creator with many great tools, Students can create cartoon characters, cartoons and books, all automatically published. Even better its free.

A new initative from Toondoo is the school domain, a chance to have a space just for your students work. More from Toondoo below.

‘Thanks to concerns (related to inappropriate content) from many educators, we will soon be offering exclusive school domains (such as schoolname.toondoo.com) Many schools have already signed up with us for this service. Here’s how it will work:

• We will provide a separate domain for each school (for example: http://www.schoolname.toondoo.com/).
• ONLY students of that school will be able to create toons at this domain but any one will be able to view them on the internet, embed them in blogs,wikis etc.
• We will let the teachers completely own the editorial rights in this case. That would mean they can monitor the content, block inappropriate toons and also do the editor picks.
• The domain will be free of charge during the beta testing phase of six months, post which there would be nominal annual charges for it.’

If you are interested, please contact Meera Sapra:meerasapra@toondoo.com.

Do you ever need to expand an image to create a huge, large impact poster for your classroom?
Blockposter will take your photo and create a large block poster. You pick the size and blockposter returns a PDF ready for printing.

Its free, quick and doesnt require a sign in. So next time you want to create a large display for your classroom you may like to give blockposter a try

ITSC looks at web 2.0
Interstingly apple or at least ITSC is embracing web 2.0 tools. After feedback from last years conference that ITSC lacked a relevance to what was really happening.
This year around half of the sessions are web 2.0 based or related, of course with a bent towards apple linked or dependent tools.

Beyond Podcasting – Mogopop in the classroom
I was lucky to attend the Beyond Podcasting – Mogopop in the classroom

Mogopop is a program that allows you to create a lesson, sequesnce or learning event
This is then uploaded to an ipod and students can follow a series of pages with tasks, links to photos, movies and music.
We created an “Amazing Race” discovery based journey around Sydney, published this to Mogopop which fellow participants downloaded and transfered to their ipod.

They then completed the excursion guided by their ipod and gathered photographic, video and “real” resources to complete the journey.
When the group had completed the excursion they then completed a quiz on the ipod to reinforce the learning from the excursion. This was created in either iwriter or iquiz maker.
Sound cool?? It was. Would it work in the classroom? Not sure, read on!!

Mogopop
What was good?
Mogopop is free and quite easy to use.
Your mogopops are published and easy to get to the students

What wasnt so good?
The images, movies and music are links not usable in place
It will not work on a ipod touch, some nanos and older ipods.
The resources can be hard to read due to the screen size

iwriter
Pros
Capable of quite detailed resource creation
Cons
Costs money
No one in the group including instructors could get it to upload to the ipod to use!!

iquiz maker
Pros
Completed quizes look quite professional
Cons
The students must buy iquiz to complete the quiz
Will not work on the new nanos, touch, shuffle or older ipods

The round table discussion at lunch after the final session probably summed up the group feeling on these tools. At a table of 10 educators who had just devoted 3 days to learning about this use of technology, no one felt they would implement the tools outlined within their schools or classrooms.

However more importantly each teacher had developed ideas about ipods, education and learning. As with any of these technologies we need to use the most appriopriate tools for the job, the tool that will enhance student learning.

Blogged with Flock

If you would like some help using the tools mentioned in the presentation you will find links at the top of this page. At these links you will find a movie that will guide you through the process of using each of these tools

Blogged with Flock

Tags: web2.0

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Creative_commons

Animoto can be used to create powerful multimedia quickly and easily. It can be used with k-12 classes and helps to promote an understanding of visual literacyStudents can shoot and/or collect potent images, create powerful verbal audio to accompany their images or compose songs to accompany their visuals. It provokes the student to consider both the impact of their work and the media choosen for that work.

When the movie is embedded in other web 2.0 tools it encourages real world feedback on student work.

The movie below was created as a year 4 students Religious Literacy Assessment, the student wrote and performed the song, gathered the images and created this in Animoto.

Below you will find two video tutorials on how to create an Animoto account and then how to create a movie in Animoto.

Creating an account in Animoto

Download Video: Posted at TeacherTube.com.

Creating a movie in Animoto

Download Video: Posted at TeacherTube.com.

Animoto is an amazing movie creator, add photos, choose music and Animoto does the work.

The Chorpus Christ movie below took about 2 minutes to create!!!!

Alan Levine has put together fifty web tools you can use to create create a story. They are organized into categories according to the kind of story thet can produce or the kind of media they are built around.This is a great resource to encourage your students to present their stories and ideas in different fomats

You can find the ideas here – StoryTools

technorati tags:presentations, web2.0

Blogged with Flock


is a free service that will back up your blog automatically each night.
With a number of our teachers now using blogs it would be prudent to
embrace this backing up strategy.

Blog Backup Online

technorati tags:blogs, backup, web2.0

Blogged with Flock

The Macarthur Schools Joint 1:1 Staff Professional Learning Day is an initiative to support teachers in their move to a 1 child-1 laptop(1:1) learning environment in 2008. This posting supports a session on Web 2.0 tools delivered on the day.

This session will look at a selection of web 2.0 tools that can be integrated into your classroom practice immediately.

The presentation can be found below, hosted on slideshare and the examples displayed can be found at http://del.icio.us/MarkWoolley/MacPDDay

[slideshare id=50739&doc=web-20-tools-for-your-classroom-right-now-10302&w=425]

The Web 2.0 tools in our grab bag can be found at the links below

For each of these tools it is simply a matter of signing up and start exploring. You can probably find a class expert for each of these tools

You can find additional information about blogs, wikis, del.icio.us and RSS on the pages of this blog.

Technorati Tags: Web2.0, Education, Learning