Give students places to create: Wikis

What is a Wiki? The most well-known example is Wikipedia, and not so well-known Wikibooks. You can create an account and edit content on both of these pages. Never fear, there are plenty of administrators that can control editions and modifications…too a point.

Wikispaces is a wonderful way to share the concept of a Wiki with your students, while giving them Web Space for creating their own content. Although blogs can be a great tool for students to share digital content, Wikis seems to provide teachers with enough flexibility in creating student web pages (See account support here>>>http://www.wikispaces.com/help+Teachers )

Create your own Wikispace. Once you are in a school, you can apply for the educators version and create users for all your students, create pages for them and UNLEASH them!

Netvibes…your answer?!?!

RSS is ‘really simple syndication”. So where do we store this syndication? How about on a personalized homepage. A homepage that appears everything you open your Internet browser (hopefully Firefox).

The way I see it, you have 3 options for organizing and managing your RSS feeds.

iGoogle: Homepage gadgets and RSS feeds.

Pageflakes

Netvibes: Steve’s favorite.

What is RSS and why do I care?

RSS means ‘Really Simple Syndication’. Is it really simple?

You can find RSS almost anywhere. You can find it on this blog, on your blog, on all blogs. Many websites now provide RSS feeds for all there content. Most sites even provide feeds for caterigoes of content. Sites like Digg, provide many RSS options.

What do you do with RSS? Well…what I do is subscribe to all the RSS feeds while storing them on a personalized homepage. On this homepage I can see the lastest headlines of all my favorite sites from one place.

Still not sure? What do our friends @Commoncraft have to say about RSS?

Machine is us/ing Us

Although a few of you have already commenting on see this, I am sharing it again to emphasize the point on how to organize all the info that is out their in a more manageable way. How can you control the Internet?

Finally…Comic Life

Another resource for Digital Storytelling. Visual learners can insert photos and images that they create into the program, add call outs, text effects and publish as image or video.

Check out this site for classroom applications>>>http://www.macinstruct.com/node/69

Check out Steve’s Blog about ComicLife>>>http://tjtechguy.edublogs.org/2008/10/29/comic-lifecan-life-get-better/

SOL Comics for 2-9>>>http://64.207.181.50/solutions/index.htm

more about “ComicLife tutorial on Vimeo”, posted with vodpod

Podcasts

What if the majority of your students have iPods…could you and the class create content for them? Creating and sharing podcasts has never been easier. Even if they don’t have iPods, sharing podcasts on your Blogs can provide visual (video) or audio podcasts.

How Tagging Solves the Problem of the Physical World

One of my favorite blogger/educator posted recently about Tagging. You have seen the concept of tagging when using Wordle and/or Wordsift, but why is important to what we produce and share on the Internet? Becthablog does are great job of explaining in text and video. Please read and/or watch to understand the importance of tagging your web content and modelling tagging to your students.

Blog>>>

Video>>>Don’t feel you need to watch the entire 20 minute vid…

more about "I Like Delicious Things on Vimeo", posted with vodpod

Fun Mashups Dave Troy

Two very cool Mashups from Dave Troy. I was inspired to find a mashup site that I seen before when I read Kate’s post about Twitter being a ‘cyber pulse’. I remembered the mashup called Twittervision which is an awesome Twitter mashup that features tweets from around the world…get info (regardless if it useless info) from around the world. Dave Troy also created Flickrvision which highlights pictures being add to Flickr throughout the globe (great 2D or 3D option).

I posed this question to Kate and you all…Could it be said that we become better communicators when we take part (even as a observer) to many, many different conversations?

thoughts?

Gordon Brown: Wiring a web for global good

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Why Learn About Internet Safety

In 2006 the state of Virginia charged all the public schools to teach internet safety. Many schools use i-Safe’s professinal development and currcilum.

Create an account on i-Safe and begin the i-Learn training.