Blabberize me

Blabberize

Blabberize is one of the most fun websites that I have found an educational use for. I can think of hundreds of way to Blabberize my lessons. Blabberize allows you to upload any picture you would like and select its mouth so that it moves with the recording you create for it. This makes the picture appear to be speaking your words on its own.Why have a lecture on the life on Abraham Lincoln when he could tell you himself? The whole process of creating one took about one minute. The website even helps guide you with step by step instructions and review option.

Class Field trip Fish

Blabberize and the classroom

The link above is to my own personal Blabber of a field trip announcement. I made this as a sample because I wanted to show a fun way a teacher can use Blabberize with students. I would give the students a link to this blabber with the instructions to watch a short video online for homework. Imagine the joy they would feel when a little fish told them about their upcoming field trip to the Shedd Aquarium. I believe this online resource can be used in many ways for student instruction. I think that students would enjoy creating them on their own for projects and reports. The range of projects is vast from a presentation on a historical figure to a simple book report. I would love to integrate Blabberize into my classroom. I feel it would help reinforce knowledge in an active and engaging fashion making the students feel less like they are learning and more like fun.

Glogster

Glogster

Glogster is a wonderful and fun tool that I have recently found. This website allows for you to create a digital poster board of anything you would like. The posters you create can contain pictures, videos, links to websites, and much more multimedia. The amount of elements a person can put on one page is mind blowing. The first few times on this website was very trial and error. As much as I enjoyed this tool, I found it challenging at first to understand how to position and add elements to my poster. Once I overcame my learn curve I found this website to be a quick and fun way to get information out quickly.

A glog about Grace

Glogster and the classroom

I feel that this tool gave me some difficulty in building my own glog. This has lead me to use this tool to provide my students information rather than have the students build personal glogs. I feel that often times in schools students over look simple information because its just a boring read. I feel that making a glog of this type of new information may help to keep students engaged. I made a simple getting to know me glog in order to help students get to know me in a fun and light fashion. I think the students would feel more connected to me thru playing videos of my pets and both verbally and visually getting a glimpse at my daily life. I think that having a glog would allow students to be come more engaged in the information at hand. I can see this being helpful for school news letters and even to replace simple hand outs. If a glog was used instead of a handout it would allow teachers to use more resources such as videos as well as allow students to review the materials at anytime they would like.

Wordle

I often feel that students have many issues in understanding poetry and themes within them. I attempted to use the site wordle to help shed a bright new light on the important words and themes within The Road not taken by Robert Frost.

Wordle of The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

What is a wordle?

Wordle is a website that take the words you have entered and creates a word cluster that makes each one larger based on how often the word is repeated. The hope is that the more important a words will be larger and the least important will be the smallest. 

Wordle and the classroom

In trying to use wordle, I found the experience to be extremely easy to understand. You just type in the words you would like to use and repeat the important ones more often. You can also copy and paste in any work and wordle will delete all the common English words. Examples of the common English words are; and, the, these, ect. I feel that given the easy at which I learned to use this tool, children will learn this tool with the same easy, if not more. I feel that this can help student instruction for both post and pre-reading strategies. Wordle helps to teach students to prioritize concepts and ideas based on importance to the reading. I feel I would use Wordle as pre-reading for younger students to help tell me what words they feel are most important to the story. For post reading, I would use Wordle to have student list word and themes within a story and have them choose what is important and explain to the class why they choose those words. I feel that Wordle is useful both inside and outside of the classroom.