TOOL7 Digital Storytelling

I enjoyed playing with Photo story. My Nephew Aaron was again learning with me. We thought of a lot of ideas to do with it. We were going to do an expos`e on 24 Hours in the life of a 13 year old boy.( his brother) but we have not gotten the picts yet. Aaron is also working on "24 hours in the life of an 8 year old," but is still working on the angle to use. While watching Say yes to the Dress, I started looking onthe internet for ugly wedding dresses. My neice is hoping to get married soon so I decided to make a photostory for her- Really Ugly Wedding dresses and bridesmaid dresses. I have it made and saves as a wmv but I can not find anywere that says what to do next- to get it on my blog. I feel really dum but I just don't know what to do.
I thought if using this as a vocabulary building for kinder. I could collect a lot of pictures in a catagory or topic then have it go through naming the things- farm animals, zoo animals, reptiles, school things..
I would love to hear how to upload my photostory!! Thank

TOOL6 Wikis

Wikis are really neat. I loved the Greetings From Around the World and Educational Oragami. In the Greetings, you can see that the kids learned things abouut their topic and then creativly showed what they learned. I looked at the one where a 1st grade class wrote a story over a period of time but it had been so edited by others I could not see what the 1st greaders did. The one that third graders did was like a pick your own ending type story - that was cute.

This looks like a easy place to publish student work. For my KinderKids I could post their work. I think that maybe more at the end of the year when they are writing a little more, we could maybe do report type with different students putting up different parts. I will contune to look at others ideas and see what else my kids could do with Wikis.

Tool5 Tagging

Tagging sounds like a great idea until you have tags and lists and bookmarks everywhere. I get very confused and overwhelmed with it all. I guess if I just chose one it would be better. for older kids I think it could be useful when doing research,especially with a group, they could collect sites, highlite what they like ( Diigo) and share them with each other, then decide what to use. One website I found using the tag kindergarten was
http://www.time4learning.com/reading/kindergarten-reading-program.shtml
it has good teacher infoand a cool chart that show reading development skills from 3yearolds - 5th grade.
The other site I found was http://www.kindersite.org/Directory/DirectoryFrame.htm
this site has a lot of fun math games for kinder. some links are old but the bus addtition game works as well as most of the others.
I am not sure how I would use Diigo or delicious with kindergarten. I will continue to watch others blogs to get ideas.

Tool4 googledocs and reader

I have used google docs before. this time I created a document to share with my teammates to compare our possible schedules for next fall. It was easy to put it up but does not have a lot of flexibility. I could not easily adjust the colum size and such like inn word. I showed my 8 year old nephew how to make an igoogle page and to use google docs. he thinks it is really cool he had me upload the book he is writing on to google docs. now he want his best friend to get an account so he can share it with her and he is hoping that she can add pictures to it as they work. He think it is a great tool. the big thing I noticed when editing was that I had to click 2-3 lines below the line I wanted to edit. I do not know if that is common or if it was just a problem with google docs today.
I also made a google readeer page. It will be helpful in keeping track of a variety of blogs without having to search all over for them. this could be helpful for students too if they are asked to follow several blogs or other feeds.

Tool3 continued

I just love Bookr. I can see my kids making ther own online books (with some help.) It is so easy and it looks so great. I searched different words for rocks and came across only appropriate pictures, but I wonder if other searches might come up with inapprorpiate ones. I could make a library for the kids after I know their topic, then use a username that they can search instead of tags.
I did make a word cloud but although they look cool, when applied to just a paragraph of text, it doesn't really mean anything. It might be cool to have all the kids add their own words that describe a character, place concept, put it in a word cloud and see what words come up the most(biggest). That would be interesting-kind of like a random graph.
My question now is- How can I make my spell with flickr smaller. I could make it into a jpg and just make it smaller, but int he html I do not see a place to change it's size.

Tool 3

So with all those image tools you would think I would find some I liked. Well,I did but not many. Moatly I did not see a educational use for them except maybe to keep thekids more interested. For kinder, they are too hard for my kids. well some they could do but not the embeddeding part. Well, maybe I am not giving my 5 year olds enough credit, maybe they could after a lot of help??
I tried all of the image editors some were easy to use(spell with flickr, FX, jigsaw, walk of fame,sidewalk) some were more difficult ( mappr.) Many required ( for all I could see) that you upload your images to flickr before you could use the tool ( imapflickr, flikrriver.) On my blog, I posted my example of spell with flikr, sidewalk( image chef), poetry blender (image chef.)
I thought logomaker was really dumb. maybe I missed something.
I think the cartoom maker and bublr could be used to retell in cartoon form but too hard for kinders. maybe we could do it as a small group.

Post 2 Online communities

Online education communities can be a great tool for sharing with students in other places or at times other thant classroom time. It kind of makes me think of the old fashion pen pals with a turbo charge. I have heard it used to relay messages about assignmnets, to do assignments and to just pass on new information. I thing at my school there are still many who do not have internet access to have blogging as an out of school assignement but kids could be given time to work on it during the day or afterschool in the library. In Kindergarten I would use a group blog for either the whole class or small groups. then we can do shared reading /writing while blogging. then share with other kinder groups in our building( or out).

2. What point stood out to you from the commenting advice? Use commenting as a way to teach tech etiquettely . I liked the way both talked about how to not only make better coments but also how to elicit better comments.
3. What five blogs did you select for your comments? so far Jill Sherrill, Maria/Alejandra Palermo,