Task Six - Cool Tools

First off, I added Eric Thomas to my reader. Then I set off to explore some coooooool toooooools.

Skype, http://www.skype.com -

I've had Skype on my computer since last year sometime. I hardly use it, but it's been good to be able to see people sometimes, my mother after the death of a good friend and Tami when she tries to help me untangle things on my computer. I called Amy and Brandon, but they were not online. I'll pester them more soon.

I liked Quizlet. They have Chinese flash cards! I had to play around with it for a while to get that hang of what it was asking for and how to play the games. I set up an account, and I plan to set up a set of flash cards for my Mandarin students.

I was not impressed with TeacherTube. I looked up China videos, and the first several had spelling errors. I can't use that.

Library Thing was cool! I plan to enter the classroom's books on China and Egypt, if only to keep track of them! Maybe something else useful will pop out of their forums, links, and other bells and whistles.

Shelfari looks similar to Library Thing but touts itself as a social network, which I don't need.

Flash Card Friends looks like it does something like Quizlet, so I'll keep it in mind.

Pixton for making web comics is pretty nifty but not something I'm going to do right away myself. I can think of several kids that could do magic with an account. The trick on using lots of these kinds of web projects is that the kids need an account. I suppose I could set up an account and give them all the password and have them all do their work on one account. Would that work for me and for the school safety guidelines? Toondoo is similar, seems a little more kid friendly.

30 Boxes is a calendar site. I still keep a paper pocket calendar.

I looked at Ta-da List. I like lists and use them all of the time, but Ta-da doesn't have the flexibility of subordinate lists within lists, and I would be nervous about storing my vital lists online and needing them away from online.

I created a glog at Glogster. It's fun, but it's not interesting to do it by myself in the long run. I could have the kids do one collectively.

Go!Animate is a cool animated cartoon creation site. I'd like to look at it with Becca and see if it's something we might use for Grammar movies some time. I liked the cartoon "Grease-Easy"! They also have coooool Star Trek cartoons. It's an amazing new world.

Prezi seems like a hip new power point in the hands of most. The creator seems to show the promise of coming at it from lots of directions, but most prezis seem linear. I liked one about social media. I have a hard enough time getting the kids to lay something out in power point, but it might be interesting to have one that we built all year.

Yesterday I tried to use Quizlet in Mandarin class, but it doesn't accept direct entries in Chinese. A few were in a user database, but most were not. That was a disappointment for me and for the kids. I've tried playing with it more on my own, but it doesn't look like it will work.

I changed a setting under Comments for my blog so that anyone could comment. Amy had some trouble commenting previously. I'll check back with her and see if that change did the trick.

Let's go see what's next! I need to try using more of this, successfully as it were, with my class.