There are a few web 2.0 sites I’ve looked at that could be used effectively in a classroom. These sites give students an opportunity to experience technology in a fun and interactive way. The first one is PicLits. I’ve never seen anything like this site before. I found it a lot of fun to play around with putting the words on the different pictures, and I think students would too. As a teacher, I could use this site to assist in teaching grammar, sentence structure, and sentence meaning. I could show them how to change a few words in a sentence to give it a different meaning, and how to use various words to describe images.
The second site is Scratch. I think Scratch is awesome! I think students would have so much fun watching these interactive videos, and making them. It would be a great opportunity to teach students about producing a video. I like how they aren’t just talking in front of a camera though, they are making a video that viewers can interact with. Making this video would help students with their story telling skills, and help them learn how to involve the audience in their projects. I think this would be a good tool to have outside of school as well. They can make videos for their friends to play with, and it gets them doing other things online besides myspace and facebook.
Another site I thought was really cool was Voki. I really like the idea of creating your own avatar and then playing with it in the Application Gallery. I think it’s a good idea for students to maybe take on the role of a different person using their avatar and do things like “create a virtual you” or have a “sidekick dance-off”. After doing that they could write out a story about what their character experienced. They could do a 1st person narrative piece, but they would have a fun, virtually created story to write about. I think that’s much better than simply assigning a homework assignment to write a narrative paper.
dcrovitz Said:
on October 20, 2009 at 11:14 am
The challenges with such sites and applications will be in how you put them to use with students…so that they in turn produce high quality and impressive work.