With the help of Kathy Schrock, I was able to find three new web 2.0 tools that I am certain to use in the classroom! Please check out my experiences, the ways I see them used in education and a review of each tool.
1) Smore - “beautiful pages instantly!” Although this site was designed to create digital flyers, it has amazing potential in education! I’m no longer crafting paper newsletters for my class... I intend to create an end of the year newsletter using this tool. Once you make a template or skeleton for your newsletter, all you need to do is change the style or theme for each month's edition to fit the season. I’m excited to add multimedia rich content including: videos, pictures, or tweets. With the added bonus of privacy features, you can quickly add the link to your Wiki, send an email blast or tweet to your class. I’m excited to finish this over the weekend and send it to my families. I intend to use this exclusively next school year in lieu of paper printouts. Our school is placing a heavy emphasis on using less paper and at this point, my newsletters were my only paper communication. This not only adds options to the home to school connection, but supports the environmentally friendly message I try so hard to instill with my kids. As an added bonus you can track analytics by seeing you who views the page, for how long, and if they followed any links placed within the page.
This site is extremely easy to use with the drag and drop feature. I was able to add photos of the kids and I intend to use the gallery feature in future installments. I enjoyed how simple it was and it left me with no challenges thanks to simplicity. I was able to quickly find the privacy settings and ensure the security of class. Please, check out Smore for your next newsletter!
Review:
Functionality: 8/10
Educational value: 9/10
User friendliness: 8/10
2) Google Forms - Create a survey, quiz or exit ticket for your class to easily access. One of the greatest benefits of using Google Forms is there are no log-ins. You can share the link through email or better yet, create a QR code for your class to scan and access. I’ve been hooked on Socrative since it was first introduced and use it as a formative assessment with my students. However, it is often hard to navigate and the workflow for creating quizzes are often time consuming. I enjoy the fact you can control the quiz pace from the teacher device, but this is not a “must-have.” As I am addicted to Google Drive and Docs, I’m surprised I haven’t used Forms. It was not only simple, but gave me all the features I needed to gather data. Once submitted, all of the results are stored in a spreadsheet that can sorted by category for easy access. What a convenient way to store information in an organized fashion. This is a time saver for a teacher looking to use mobile devices formative assessment tools.
Working closely with my principal on next years Site Strategic Plan, I needed feedback from our staff at the next staff. There are many options to poll individuals using the iPads and I show our staff a new tool at every meeting, so I was planning on using TodaysMeet. It is a web tool that allows users to create short 140 character messages in a common thread. However, Google Forms is much more appropriate for this setting. Thanks in part to this assignment I have changed gears and created a simple Google Form that I will email to the staff during o
ur collaboration time within the staff meeting.
For this activity I was able to quickly navigate the available question types, themes and editing tools to create a Form. I’m excited to see the results on Tuesday morning.
Please check out the Google Form I’ve created.
Review:
Functionality: 8/10
Educational value: 8/10
User friendliness: 8/10
3) WeVideo - Create and edit a video in the cloud! This company's mission was to create an online creative toolbox for children that they could use at home and school. What a brilliant idea! Previously, students were confined to only one computer or tablet to edit video. Now, they can travel from computer to tablet and back to computer (endlessly) while editing the same content. With the shared successes of this tool and the integration of WeVideo on Google Drive this is certain to be a hit in education; free of charge! The service is easy to navigate while you seamlessly integrate audio, video, graphics and pictures into a multimedia presentation. With the push for cloud based tools, I wonder how long before WeVideo has some competition?
The tool was a breeze to use and I’m excited to share the final product with some of my climbing friends. Instead of editing this video using iMovie like I had intended, I decided to give WeVideo a go. It shared many of the positive features I enjoy with iMovie. It is simple, with the bare essentials of editing tools. I can imagine classrooms adopting this tool, so they can shoot video on a mobile device, upload it to the cloud, then edit it from home, computer lab, and classroom. They may now collaborate on the same final product. Great idea brought to reality! I’m a firm believer in the statement, “if you dream it, you can build it.” WeVideo is just that!
While using WeVideo I did experience some problems with the transitions feature, so I went through the process of emailing the developer the errors I was receiving. I went ahead and gave them them my browser usage, intended workflow and suggestions to help make the tool more desirable.
In an attempt to use the tool and edit some video, I used climbing footage from last weekend. Here you will see me bouldering on Mt. San Jacinto in Southern California.
https://vimeo.com/66792967
Review:
Review:
Functionality: 7/10 - some bugs need to be fixed
Educational value: 9/10
User friendliness: 7/10 - I would prefer to use iMovie
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