The options are endless!
Animoto
I can guarantee that my students would love this, and there are so many ways this could be used in the classroom. For example, in social studies, the students could find pictures of "Road to Revolution" events - Boston Massacre, Boston Tea Party - label these pictures and then set the presentation to music. What a great review tool! My students could also use Animoto to practice their spelling words - similar to what this student did. Finally, students could do book presentations. Each reading group reads a lot of books, and they could present their book using Animoto. This would require creativity since they would have to find pictures pertaining to the book, but I can pinpoint several kids who would be up for that challenge!
Managing this tool is going to take some thought. Students already know how to search pictures using Britannica Image Quest, so we have that part down. Teaching them how to upload their pictures to the tool should only require a quick mini-lesson since students have been doing that all year using programs such as thinglnk. The other management issue would be figuring out where to turn their projects in. Usually, I just have my students embed their projects via a discussion post in eClass. In my research of Animoto, I noticed that they have an embed option as well so turning in work should be a simple reminder to the students of how to embed their work. Since we have worked on embedding things all year, most students should not have an issue with that, and most probably could figure out how to embed it on their own.
Regarding challenges, setting up student accounts could be difficult. I teach three different reading classes, so having them all share my account could get messy and confusing. I checked the "help" section of Animoto, and they recommend setting up student accounts using unique email addresses that are connected to my own gmail address. Click here to read an article by Ole Michelson that talks about how to do this. The other challenge would be the pictures. I have had several students in the past conduct very inappropriate Google image searches despite the fact that they knew that Google image searches are banned in my room. As a result, monitoring the pictures they choose and where they find the pictures will be very important when using this program. I now have students set up in such a way in my room that I can see what they are doing on their devices at all times. I also do random device checks where I call a student to my reading group and ask them to show me what they have been doing during center time. Students never know when they will be called so this helps them stay on track.
Google Docs
I have been late to jump on the Google Docs train, but I'm on it now! This tool can be utilized for every subject in school to support teaching and learning. For example, if I created a slideshow on homophones (see my previous blog post), I could post the link to this slideshow on to eClass and the students could view it at home. I can also use the tool as a place for my students to complete work. For example, I was recently introduced to Newsela.com. This website has all kinds of articles at varying lexile levels, and most articles come with a quiz. The cool thing is that each article has multiple lexile options, so the entire class can read the same content but at varying lexile levels. Talk about easy differentiation!! Anyway, my plan this week is to copy one of these articles plus the quiz into a Google Doc and then give the link to each reading group via eClass. (Each reading group will receive a different link since the article will be at a variety of levels). The group can click on the link, read the article, and then complete the quiz right on the document. I will set my shareable link so that anyone with the link can view AND edit. Then, I can go in behind them and check their work. I am without a doubt incredibly excited about this, and I cannot wait to see how this works in my classroom.
As far as managing this tool, I would only give each group THEIR link. I will set these links up in eClass that way so that each group only can see their link. This will prevent anyone from looking at any other group's quiz answers. When I post other things, I will make sure that the settings are set so that no can edit the documents.
One challenge to using this tool would be the collaboration aspect of it. Since I teach so many students, I would need to make sure to create multiple documents so that the entire class is not only interacting with ONE document.
These web 2.0 tools seem like they would be fantastic additions to teaching and learning, and I cannot wait to try them out!!!