More cool tools! There is so much fun stuff in the internet, though it's not always as handy or applicable as what I already have to work with. Still, exploring is awesome!
Glifty is cool looking mapping software at first but only 30 days free and only good for mapping offices and homes. Mindomo also looks cool, but Inspiration is plenty enough for what we need in the classroom and is at about the limit of what we can teach our kids.
I next visited Jigzone. I tried cute kitten first. I added it to my Sand Castle, though it wasn't working on the website for me. Still, it's cute!
Letterpop is cool for creating newsletter type things, but I think Word does almost all of that, and Letterpop only allows limited usage with the free account.
Mixbook sounds interesting, though more to post online than to publish physically. I like the idea that I can add collaborators like parents and students, perhaps to compile photos from Camp Greenville or a China trip. Of course, months or more will intervene. Will the software still be out there?
Timeglider is sooooo slow. It could be cool, but the software like it that I've used on my own computer is much faster.
Sketchcast is a cool way to capture the process of drawing, and I'd be happy to lead an interested kid to it, but it's not for me.
On Weebly I created a new drag-and-drop website, The Dragon's Lair. I couldn't get images to work yet, but it looks nifty, and kids could do lots of things easily. I, though, like the idea of them building a wiki site with me and Becca rather than having little web-lets all over the place.
United Streaming AKA Discovery Education is way cool, but my Windows Media Player doesn't seem to be working. I can run it on my old WMP, but when I download one or just try to play it on the site, another WMP pops up on the dock and then quickly vanishes. Mysterious! Sounds like I'll have to pester the Paideia tech wizards.
Yackpack was down, but it doesn't sound like something I'd use right away. I'll check it out again later.
All in all, Mixbook for a field trip and the many offerings of Discovery Education seem the most useful for now, but wikis are still the most exciting tool I've found so far.
I also searched for some things on my own using seomoz.org, where I found Urban Spoon Atlanta Restaurants, which has descriptions and ratings of more than six hundred Chinese and East Asian restaurants!
There was some other nifty stuff out there, but nothing grabbed me as interesting in an ongoing way or applicable in my classroom.
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