Xtranormal Storytelling

Just found Xtranormal on Twitter (from @NikPeachey) and made this movie in about 30 minutes with their "text to movie" feature. The movies are very simple to make which is good for younger students, but don't have a ton of options like Photostory. Xtranormal reminds me of a more complex voki and it is free, for now. It could be an interesting way to put instructions for students on a website or wiki. I tried it on my class wiki here.


By the way, Twitter is so great for finding these kinds of tools. I am following about 90 people on my personal account, mostly educators, so there are lots opportunities to hear what people are doing in their classrooms. And, since twitter is only 140 characters, people are much more likely to share ideas they might not otherwise blog about. I think I get more ideas from Twitter than just about any other resource.

Nifty Resource

My son's friend told me about ReadWriteThink from NCTE that is full of nifty resources, including things like interactive Venn Diagrams. Since my students are getting ready to write a compare/contrast essay, things like this will be awesome and super great to use on a SmartBoard. Since it's from NCTE, it's English/Language Arts oriented, but there are still some tools that anyone can use, like the aforementioned Venn Diagram, and a Compare/Contrast Guide and Map, etc. Enjoy!

Preparing to use technology...

I am off to a slow start this school year with using technology in my classroom. So far the only thing I've done is shown a Discover Streaming video to my students. But I am getting excited and feeling like I am now ready to go for it! My next step will be to use voki during writing. We're learning about statements, questions, commands and exclamations. I will have the students write one of each and then compile them with a voki. Anyone have another idea of how to use vokis with Writing? Thank you Global Learners for inspiring me to get things rolling!

Blogging Improves Writing...

Here is a link to an article I received through my classblogmeister group. I found it very fitting after my first trial with first graders and the laptops. Their behavior was wonderful in preparation for writing their first blog article. Once they turned the laptop on and I got them started, they were able to navigate quite well. Once I showed them one thing, they taught the other students who were a couple of steps behind.

They copied their writing into their blog after writing a draft on paper. Wow, they got right to work on their article knowing anyone might look at it. The only instruction I gave them for their article was that they had to choose a topic they wanted to share with the world. Now, if only we could work on using the space bar...

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0910/p09s03-coop.htm

Our class blog
- check out their articles, they did a great job!