Archive for the 'web2.0' Category

As we’re in full steam preparing for one more exciting free online session for educators all over the globe through the Electronic Village Online, I was just following my thwirls when I saw Nik Peachey ’s tip of http://flickriver.com

Well, I thought I’d better give it a try as it was totally related to what I was doing, planning our Weekly tasks in our images4education session, and, more specifically, working on tasks for Flickr.
So, here’s the result:

I chose the tag Uniqueness, but it could be any, as well as a combination of a username and its tag. I think Flickriver will be useful when our group is in action and we could decide for a unique tag, participants upload a photo and we play around with Flickriver to see where it takes us in terms of images.
I could even imagine doing the following activity with students. They enter a tag they want to, five random photos will be displayed and they could have the photos as a springboard to a very creative story! How cool is that? Well, teachers, teachers, teachers…Always finding a pedagogical twist to social media!
PS: the funny thing? I was checking Nik’s link to his blog and realized he, in fact, wrote about Flickriver. So, enjoy two blog posts on the same topics by two educators. You might find something useful!
Want to find more useful resources to use images in the classroom? Check our Diigo group which we’re using to collect the resources for our Images4Education session in January 2009.
Group EVO2009-Images Bookmarks

I just got this video via Twitter (a microblogging site) from a dear friend, Ana Maria Menezes, a mineirinha, who has a bag full of tricks to share.

The story is simple, but then, I just realized that it is a wonderful springboard to explore language. Imagine a group activity, or even a collaborative project with sister classes in which they have the same claymation and learners are responsible for creating the stories to go with the animation. They could even record the stories.
How motivating would that be? Is it the kind of experiential learning we could add more frequently to our lesson plans? Do you have any other ideas to go with this video? Or do you have any other video that could be used for the same idea?
Originally posted at http://webtools4educators.blogspot.com/2008/10/telling-story.html

When you are open to explore what out there, ideas, resources seem to converge. Coincidence, convergence, whatever…The fact is that for the past days I’ve been giving a lot of thought on how to best engage, hook students up front from the beginning of their e-learning journey. I’m devising an online course for Brazilian educators and the point is that if they don’t get excited with the possibilities ahead of them, how could they inspire their own learners? So, I’ve been reading, thinking and exploring a lot and just yesterday I read two interesting blog posts on how to use starters, grabbers, icebreakers in the beginning of a course. It doesn’t mean it needs to be online. How could we use attention grabbers to hook our learners, to have them motivated to take the risk, to collaborate, to inspire them to go beyond?
As always, Michelle Martin’s Web2.0Wednesday idea has a perfect timing to what I’ve been mulling over. So, here are a few digital ideas for the classroom we could use to have a grand beginning: Kevin Shadix suggests hooking learners with simple stories. To do that, for example, you could use Slideshare just like he did.

Hooking learners with a simple story « the Shady Learning Blog via kwout

Rupa talks about the use of comics as an attention grabber. You could use ToonDoo, for example, to produce and customize your own comics, or even have your learners produce a comic strip to introduce themselves. Cool! Need to test that.
If they are a Face2Face group, I’d ask to take a photo of their partners and using a mobile, they could send it to a Flickr account (Flickr gives you an email to send photos to) with the title having the name of the person, and some thing curious the photographer found about their peers.
This could also be done using Picwing . Beforehand, just set up an email at picwing that students can send photos to, like  classxxx at picwing.com. Then, students can send their photos to this email with their names and a curious fact in the Subject line. Another possibility is to ask them to email a photo of their favorite room, place, city, etc. This would be really fun!
One more idea with photos: students could choose one of the geeks drawn by Extra Life and blog it saying why they chose that specific geek. The photos are copyrighted, but we could get in touch with the artist to see if he could let us use it for educational purposes. I’d love to see this into practice.
Wow, ideas are popping up!
Another one that I tried with a group of moderators in the beginning of the year and it worked well was recording our introductions in Voicethread. We, then, could invite learners to add their intros and ask questions to the instructor.
Here’s what we did:


Well, some ideas that might help me and others! There are tons to add. What’s your idea? We could certainly make a pool of nice web2.0 icebreakers!
Just got this nice idea from Nik Peachy. He suggested the site Yearbookyourself to make up a version of you in old times. Totally fun! Here’s one of the results:

I just tested Picwing to make a photo album.
Interesting tool for collaboration. Once you start the album, others can join you and send photos to it via email. For example, I created this album with Brasilia photos. If others have photos of Brasilia to share, they can just attach their photos in an email post and send them to  brasilia at picwing.com . The photos will be posted to the album.
Possibilities: imagine a collaborative effort in a class on a specific theme? You can start the album and have students add photos to it. If they have a mobile with email, they can send it straight from their mobiles. How fun would it be to have something like that with photos of the “First Day of class”?

Picwing - Live photo sharing. Email your pictures, share them instantly. via kwout

Vacation, trips. Maps are part of our reference, our guide.
Just found out about UMapper and couldn’t resist testing it. I had fun playing with it, getting different perspectives from the city I love. It’s easy to use and has great potential for the classroom, as students can collaborate to create a roadmap for others to learn more about their countries, hometown, or neighborhood.
Here’s my first example, but I plan to explore more and add photos and more information about the city of my heart, Brasilia!

UMapper / Explore / Brasilia via kwout