Web 2.0 – Page 6 – Teaching with Technology

Spell With Flickr

Posted on March 18, 2007 by Tina Coffey

This site, Spell With Flickr, is so much fun–my first grade teacher side kicked in! ABCDEFGH….

Enter a phrase and get back images (from flickr) that spell it out with letter pictures!

Okay, okay…now how can we really use this for school other than to create really cool titles on our webpages? What first comes to my mind are word walls, letter books, and tons of other K-2 uses. It also inspires me to go grab a digital camera and take my own pictures. Kids would love to go on scavenger hunt with the digital camera…not only for letters, but what about sight words? Numbers? Shapes? Can you think of something else? Add a comment below!

Salem City Schools, Web 2.0

Zoho (and other free polling sites)

Posted on March 13, 2007 by Tina Coffey

I made this poll using Zoho polls. Try it out.
http://zohopolls.com/external/tcoffey/do-you-look-at-or-use-your-schools-calendar-in-kerio-webmail
The great news is that it is free! There are other sites that create free polls and surveys too!

Could you see a use for this in the classroom? I could…especially when you are doing units on graphing. But also, what a great way to allow students to have a voice!

Links, Tech Tools, Web 2.0

ReadWriteThink

Posted on February 12, 2007 by Tina Coffey

Okay, another great website I want to share. It’s called ReadWriteThink, and is a partnership between the International Reading Association (IRA), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and the Verizon Foundation. It has all sorts of great FREE resources, but my favorite is the section called student materials. It contains all sorts of reading and writing activities you can have your students do online, including Acrostic Poems, Bio Cubes, Character Trading Cards, Shape Poems, Timelines, Word Build and Bank, and much, much more! Check it out!! The one drawback to this site is that your students will have to complete and print their activities in one sitting…there is no option to save the activities for later use. For most activities, though, this shouldn’t be a problem if you plan ahead!

Links, Tech Tools, Web 2.0

Photo Editing

Posted on February 12, 2007 by Tina Coffey

Do you take a lot of digital pictures? Here’s a site that will help you edit them — www.picnik.com. You can upload your photos to this site, edit them, and then print, save, or even email them.

*Note: While it’s running in beta (a trial version) all the features on the site are free. Later, it will still allow you to use basic editing tools, but you will need to have a paid subscription. *

Salem City Schools, Web 2.0

GWC FLASH students create two podcasts!

Posted on October 25, 2006 by Tina Coffey

During the FLASH program (Fun Learning After School Hours) at GWC, six students in grades 3-5 worked together to write, record, and produce two podcasts and a promo! The students learned how to use a program called Audacity to record and edit audio. They also worked together to pick a theme for their podcasts and to devise segments for each theme. They even researched information, wrote a script, and recorded audio for their own segments! While we ran out of time and they were unable to put all the segments together themselves, they had input on how that would sound too. They were very proud of their hard work (I wish you could have seen their faces as they listened for the first time)! If you’d like to listen, visit the podcast section of the GWC website http://www.salem.k12.va.us/gwc/podcasts/CarverCast.htm. These podcasts were purely fun (since this was a FLASH class), but just think how neat it would be to have your students create a similar podcast on an SOL topic! Contact me if you are interested. If you teach grades 3-5 at GWC, you may already have an “expert” student in your class to assist!