Challenge #18 - 21st Century Assignments

Tired of assigning presentations, posters, or papers?

Then today is your lucky day. I've got some tricks you can add to your teaching bag; pull something fun out when you need to change things up a bit. Hang on to your hats, because we're going to cover a lot of territory.

**If these things scare you because you may be a bit afraid of the unknown, remember that many of your students feel WAY more comfortable in this environment than you do. Give them some time to feel these tools out, and you'd be surprised what they can come up with.

Glogster EDU

Bring tired old posters to life with video, animation, sticky notes, audio clips, and other fun graphic tools. Glogster EDU is the educational offshoot of the popular Glogster site -- I would definitely advise you to use the Glogster EDU site with your students over the regular Glogster site, as there is a lot of inappropriate content on the latter. Click here and here to see examples of how it can be used in the classroom. If you're interested, you can download the Educator Resources Guide.

Word Clouds
Word clouds are visual representations of chosen text. Popular services include Wordle, Word Mosaic, and Tagul (which adds the option of Google searches when you click on a word) You can either write text or pasted text into a box, and based on the number of times a particular word appears in the text, word cloud generators will create a random display of the words, with more frequent words appearing larger than others. You can use it simply to create a piece of art, or to analyze word choice in a particular text. Here is Obabma's Inauguration Speech in Wordle (click for a better view):

Animoto

Straight from Animoto's website: "Animoto automatically produces beautifully orchestrated, completely unique video pieces from you photos, video clips, and music. Fast, free and shockingly easy." The basic, free accounts lets you create up to 30 seconds worth of free video. However, you can apply for an educator's account that allows you to manage free accounts for your students that are not bound by a time limit. On the educator's page, click on "view sample video" for a great peek into what Animoto can do for an assignment. Completed videos can be shared to social networking sites, embedded into web pages or blogs, or downloaded as mp4s (viewable in iTunes or Quicktime).

To try it out, I took today's announcements, save the slides as jpgs, uploaded them to Animoto, choose some legal music from Animoto's collection, and sent it off within 2 minutes. Several minutes later, my video was completed by Animoto. Here it is:

EtherPad

EtherPad allows real-time (really) editing by numerous collaborators on one "pad." All they need to participate is a common URL link. No accounts, no sign-ins, no glitches. Once the writing is done, it can be downloaded as several file types, included Word and PDF. You as a teacher could start a discussion topic on a new "pad" and write the URL for the pad on the board. Students go to the URL, enter their name just for clarification's sake, and immediately start adding to the conversation. Each pad can have up to 16 collaborators, so for larger classes you may need more than one. They are not answering the questions individually, but working together on a single answer. Each student's comments are color-coded, so you can see what his or her contributions are while online.

Blabberize

Blabberize allows you to take any picture, create mouths on the people or animals, and record narration for them to talk. A little elementary, perhaps, but fun nevertheless. A USB microphone will be handy, and remember to tell your student to speak slowly and clearly. Be patient -- in my experience, the site is very slow at times. And be aware that anyone can post to the site, not just students and teacher, so not all content in the browse section will be appropriate. I have read in places that an education version is in the works, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

This class created "Who Am I?" blabs:

VoiceThread

From their website: With VoiceThread, group conversations are collected and shared in one place form anywhere in the world. A VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos an allows people to navigate pages and leave comments in 5 ways: computer mic, telephone, text, audio file, and webcam. Users can also doodle on the images while commenting. VoiceThreads can be embedded to show and receive comments on other sites, or exported to mp3 players of DVDs to play as archival movies.

In the browse section of VT, the blue backgrounded clips are VT tutorials. Here is one that explains what a VoiceThread is:

Google Sites

Google Sites makes creating and sharing a group website easy. With plenty of new ready-made templates available, you and your class could have a website up and running in no time at all. Create the website, invite your students to collaborate, and decide whether to keep the site public or private. The real plus is that little to no knowledge of HTML is necessary to create a good-looking, engaging site so it's perfect for classroom use.

Timelines

There are several sites out there that allow students to create timelines, either individually or as a class/group collaborative effort.

Dipity allows you to embed images, youtube videos, and news articles into your timeline. Here is one on the Apollo missions from Dipity users. HEre is an embedded example of the Haiti earthquake:

Haiti Earthquake on Dipity.

XTimeline is another option. It allows you to upload pictures and create text to provide full event details in your timeline. Here is an example of the History of the Titanic. Click and drag on the timeline to move it, and click on the events to read more.

Timelines is the name of a third option. Unlike the others, this timeline is not linear in its view, but is still arranged by date. Images and text allow round out the events of the timeline. Here is one on the Cold War. Timelines also allows you to search for topics via "What happened on..." a particular date.

Timetoast timelines are simple to use as well. By clicking on events, more information becomes available. The site is (right now) sometimes slow and unpredictable.

Others

There are more Web 2.0 tools popping up every day that will have implications for and uses in the classroom. Keep your eyes open for new opportunities that will enhance your curriculum and engage your students.

Our Challenge to You:

• Explore one of the options above. Look for content that's already created that may be useful in your classroom.
• If you feel so inclined, go ahead and create a project of your own -- one that you can use in the classroom or just a fun little personal project that will help you get accustomed to the tools.
• Blog about your experience.