I just looked into a website called Class Tools. It has so many great features for today's educators and they can all be used for FREE! All of the tools can easily be used by teachers and by students. For example, there are several graphic organizers which can be customized to fit your needs! In addition, there are links which can help with any research paper. It can help teachers and students to summarize writing, check for plagiarism, search for key words, and help to determine if sources are good. Timers are always great to show kids how much time is remaining and spinners are helpful in games and when teaching probability. The site can also choose random names when its necessary to select students and it can generate random words for games as well. There is an abundance of make your own game templates available on Class Tools. They will appeal to our Digital Native learners. Finally, another method of engaging today's children is through the "Fakebook" link. They appear very similarly to Facebook pages but can be used for educational purposes. There is a link to create statuses as well!
To present many of the features of Class Tools, I chose to create a Glogster. Glogsters are digital posters. There is a separate Glogster site made for schools called Glogster Edu. With this free site, anyone can make posters of just about anything. Images can be uploaded from your computer, searched for on Google, and there are some preloaded into the site. My problem with the site was that I couldn't make my font bold, I felt like the text boxes didn't fit together well and my glog looks kind of unorganized. I didn't want to use text bubbles that looked like speech and the remaining bubbles don't blend together well. There are even fewer choices with Glogster Edu. I think with the right amount of experience using Glogster, that my next glog will look better. I have seen many of the 6th graders that I have worked with create glogs to present their Science research. Many of them didn't look very Science related because of the available graphics. It seems to me that it is easier to create a good looking glog when doing it based on appearance and not so easy when trying to present information through it.
I have never used Glogster before, but I think yours looks great. Thank you for sharing your concerns and issues with Glogster so I know what to expect when I try it.
ReplyDeleteI hope it doesn't take you as long as it took me! Hopefully the next time it will be a little easier!
DeleteHow did you save yours? I did a glogster for my A3 but only got the link, so I did not know how to turn it in. I emailed Dr. Smirnova but haven't heard from her yet.
ReplyDeleteI know that if I right click the picture of the glog on here if gives me the option to print it so you could turn it into a pdf that way.
DeleteTo put it on here I embedded it. I couldn't take a screen shot because of the moving stuff. Somehow I managed to make it into a pdf to submit but I'd have to look back at how I did that. I know it came out sideways for some reason.
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