Posting images to blogs livens up the material because theycapture a viewer’s eye. The point is to find images that match with the content, and if the blog contains material that is obscure, the blog designer might have trouble finding images (as I did). I found that using Flickr images was difficult when it came importing the images. I would suggest using images from Wylio instead because it was much easier than Flickr.
As far as citing the images when it comes to your blog, make sure that you have included the correct information for the image, otherwise, you could find yourself in hot water. It’s important to always give the source credit, and is the equivalent of not giving an author credit.
I just added a Clustr Maps widget because I thought that it would interesting to see the location from where people may be visiting my blog. However, I think most of them will be students, and of course, the dots will be in a single region. I am planning to add some information related to other topics to make this blog more interesting in the future, so maybe I will get a variety of people that visit from other areas.
At first, this program does not look like it could be used for educational purposes. However, as I looked closer at it, I found it would be a great teaching tool for my English classes. Voki is a program that allows you to create animated and speaking avatars. It is pretty fun to use, which I am sure students would find fun as well, and allows for creativity (also enjoyable for students). The website also includes lesson plan ideas for any subject. I could use this program to have students create avatars for characters they are introduced to in assigned literature. It would allow students to picture the ways in which the characters would look and speak. They could add some of the lines that they characters say to make their creations more authentic. I have included a link to the website.
I checked out this tool called Wellwishers, and it looks like a cool program. It is basically a program that creates “sticky notes” that appear on the screen. It is great tool for typing out students’ ideas, concepts, and responses, which show up like noted tags. I would use this tool in my classroom to show students’ responses in regards to questions I ask so that all students can see their classmates’ ideas (via the labtop computer connected to a projector). Another idea would be to brainstorm possible points that may be incorporated into an assigned essay. Here is a link to the website.
Top Players
I used the program Answer Garden to create a question and feedback session regarding the top players for the 1980 Men’s U.S. Olympic Team. You can check out the work I created by clicking the “Top Players” icon above. This is a great tool that can be used by teachers in the classroom. It would be great for a question and answer session with students where the teacher poses a question, that has multiple answers, to students and types their responses into the program. I could also see myself giving my students a task where they, themselves, would come up with a question to ask students, and then, as their fellow classmates answer the question, a student could type in their responses. Here is the address for the site (http://answergarden.ch/). It is worth checking it out!
Check out these sites for more information related to the 1980 Miracle on Ice.
