Wednesday, April 21, 2010

WallWisher

In my quest of searching for new and innovative Web 2.0 tools to keep students engaged and using technology to produce and respond to instruction, I have come across a free online tool called Wallwisher.com.
Here is a quick example of a teacher asking students strategies for identifying unknown words in text. The students just add "stickies" for answers to the teacher's posted question.





Here is also an online tutorial provided by YouTube.

ToonDoo-Create, Publish, Share and Discuss!

What another great site for educators to promote e-learning within their academic environments! You can use this site to illustrate your instruction design ideas. Instead of creating text based storyboards, you can use colorful images to illustrate your ideas. Toondoo gives you a range of background images, character images and some other miscellaneous images, which you can mix and match and put them together to get the kind of image you want for your e-learning storyboards.  Toondoo gives you ready made characters and also allows you to generate custom characters You can use the characters as talking heads for your elearning courses.
Here is an example for using it in an educational purpose from the site:

photosynthesis

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Itty "Bitty" Browser

 Welcome Bitty Browser.  I saw this at the TCEA Conference and it's a neat little tool!  It's a clever bit of code which allows you to embed a web browser on a web page. Picture-in-picture for your pages.

Why in the world would you do this? Well, if you wanted to let someone jump to another site while on your site, it's an idea.  Bitty supports not just web pages, but RSS & Atom, plus podcasts. For added fun, the developers have some e-z links for popular services like Backpack, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Technorati, even MSNSpaces.


and even one for my school's website so I can check calendars, check assignments, and due dates or access grades while I'm blogging...
 






 
or my WIKISPACES: