Artifact: Time Toast

Artifact: Delicious

Three selected sites via Delicious social bookmarking site.


Angela Hoffman's Delicious Site.

Artifact: Glogster

I created the below artifact using Glogster. Glogster is a web 2.0 tool that allows users to create multimedia posters online using words, images, and video clips. I can imagine using Glogster in the classroom by having students design creative displays about books, characters, or ideas we are examining.

Artifact: Wordle

I created the Wordle below using the text of then-Senator Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech given on March 18, 2008, at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia, PA. This speech is an excellent choice for teaching rhetorical analysis, and this Wordle helps highlight the main themes of the speech (i.e., race issues) in a striking visual format.

First Impressions: Smilebox

 

For my web 2.0 project, my partner and I have been assigned Smilebox. Smilebox is an online service that allows users to use their own photos to create digital scrapbooks, greetings, slideshows, collages, and photo albums. The basic service is free, but users can upgrade to a paid membership in order to receive access to a greater number of designs and music options. Teachers may also apply to upgrade free of charge when using the service for educational purposes.

The Teacher's Toolbox link on the site provides suggestions for how educators can use the service to benefit their teaching and classroom activities. Some possible applications include creating newsletters for students and parents, overviews of teaching units, and commemorative slideshows and cards after events.

Despite these suggested uses, I am not yet impressed with Smilebox as a potential classroom tool for myself. Other than providing attractive backgrounds for pictures or text, I don't believe that its tools would truly enhance anything that I would use for teaching purposes. It's mostly just a fancy version of PowerPoint that takes more time to use and adds distracting elements. It seems much more like a scrapbooking site than anything else.

While a teacher might enjoy making a virtual scrapbook of photos as a class trip or a science fair, I don't see this service as having true educational value for me as a high school English teacher. I think Smilebox might appeal much more to someone who teachers K - 2 grades or a creative arts subject.

First Impressions: Wikis

While wikis do provide the opportunity for joint creation with multiple collaborators, I found the site we utilized (PBworks) to be less user-friendly than other web 2.0 tools I've used. Other than collating links to our individual pages together in one space, I didn't see how the use of the wiki differed from having individual blogs for students. Also, while we will learn how to co-edit a page on a future project, I didn't really get to see how to use wikis effectively for multiple contributors, such as a class of 25 students. It seemed like it would be very time-consuming and tedious to keep track of different students' contributions, edits, and efforts. I would be more much willing to utilize this tool if it had a "track changes" format similar to that of Microsoft Word where you can see all of the changes made by different contributors. The prospect of having to click on multiple different archived versions of the same page and then look for changes between versions seemed daunting.

In my future classroom, I see wikis being best utilized as a review tool for exams or projects. For example, students could post questions on a wiki so I could see all of their questions on one page, as opposed to paging through different threads on a discussion board. Students could also use this space to respond to one another with answers. I also think that wikis could be used in my classroom for group projects, where students would be placed into small groups to create and post a project

If I do choose to utilize wikis in the future, I would look further into how to track different students' contributions and how to find a program that is more user-friendly than PBworks. I'm not sold yet on their utility over other web 2.0 tools, but I can see the potential.