Glogster

Thing #2 - Glogs and Voki!

The next two things I played with are Glogster and Voki.

Here is the Glog I created for my dogs:

http://philippi.glogster.com/Thor/

I think one great way to use Glogs would be for a school project. I can just see report on a person(biography), science topic (maybe landforms), or even a book being presented in this unique and fun way!!! What a cool tool!

Voki is the newest version of the old Avatars and boy is it fun!!!


Get a Voki now!



I can see some uses for Voki's also, students could use them in Facebook to avoid putting a picture of themselves on the internet. They could also be used for creating a "character" to use for narrating a project that is posted in either a blog, wiki, or ning!
Fun, fun, fun!
LKP

Thing #2 - Wordle and Wordshift

I played around with Wordle and made the one below using the student reflections from our Problem Based Learning Elem. Summer School pilot project. The result was interesting and very visually affective.

This is a great way for students to see the power of words and understand the connection between reading the words and visualizing the meaning of those words.

Then I played with Wordshift and used an Emma Goldman Speech on "What is Patriotism?". Here it is.

Both were easy to work with, and saving them was simple because I used PowerPoint and screen capture to save the image as a jpg and then uploaded it to here.

Both of these tools would wonderful for showing students the importance of words and how they interact together. Because both enlarge the words that are used most frequently they are a great way to visually analyze any passage from a book, famous speech, or even website content! Great tool!

LKP

Thing 1 - the networked student

This video is what we should all aspire to for our students and ourselves. The 21st century will be the age of information management and use for our students and our children. As such, we need to be the connectors, modelers, and guides for them --- if we don't do this we are failing our students. This video helps even network beginners understand the potential and responsibility our profession holds for us in the 21st century! Great video!

11 1/2 Things Begins!

Okay, new journey, same old blog.
But I am hoping to use these new tools to spruce up my old blog and get back into the habit of posting to my blog again!
Soooooooooo the Beach Trip begins!!!

My First Meme

This is a meme that I got from a colleague whose blog I like to read regularly. I have never done a meme before, but this one sounded interesting, so I thought I would give a try!

meme - n. A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.

This started as a list compiled from a poll of 2000 people of the 10 books that you could not live without and has apparently "morphed" into a list of 100 books.

If you would like to participate then follow the rules below:

1. Bold the titles that you have read.
2. Italicize the titles you intend to read someday.
3. Put an asterisk* by the titles that you LOVE.
4. Strike out the titles that you have no intention of reading - ever.
(I couldn't figure out how to "strike through" the titles I don't intend to read, so I just left the text plain)


1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen*
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. The Harry Potter series - JK Rowling*
5. To Kill a Mockingbird*
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. 1984 - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials series - Phillip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott*
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier*
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell*
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis*
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis*
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown*
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas*
66. On the Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes from a Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White*
88. The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle*
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas*
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I have read 52 of the titles listed, how many have you read or want to read???
Happy Reading!
Liz

Middle School here we come!

I DON'T WANT TO GO!
This is John's comment! He is a little nervous, but I think he will really enjoy it. The charter school he will be going to offers lots of advanced classes in Math -- one of his favorite subjects, plus they offer a really interesting variety of electives. They have a unique 6 weeks program of electives that allows the students to rotate between things like; strategy games, engineering, cooking, clay arts, la crosse, computer classes, etc.
Anyway, it looks like it will be an interesting, exciting, and fun year for both of us! The only real drawback is, sigh.... getting up early again :(.
Wish us luck!