Scribble Maps is the quick and easy way to rapidly make and share maps!  Once you begin exploring this application, you will think of many ways you can incorporate it in your classroom.

Scribble Maps‘ simple-to-use online map allows you to draw shapes, place markers and text,  link to a graphic, and ’scribble’ on them as well.  You are also able to create a custom widget that can be embedded in your website or blog. 

Similar in style to Google Maps, you can zoom in and out showing the desired area you want to work with.  You have four view modes:  map, terrain, hybrid, and satellite.  Then, using the tools, you can map out (draw) a route, mark and identify locations.  With the shapes tools you can draw a circle or square around a specific area and even control the opacity of the shape.

Registration for ScribbleMaps is free.  Upgrading to ScribbleMaps Pro (also free) gives you account management, additional tools, and other features.

View the Scribble Maps Wiki for information on how to manager, edit and use your maps.  The Scribble Maps Blog has video tutorials that demonstrates some of the key functionalities.

This resource would work very will with an interactive whiteboard.

Ways to use in the K-5 Classroom:

• Plot the route you will take on a field trip.  The distance of each segment of a drawn route will appear when you hover over the line segment.  Add these distances up to find total distance.
• Mark locations on a map that represent:
  • Where students are born
  • Where students have traveled
  • Where goods are made
• Use map along with a history lesson.  Outline routes taken.  Plot locations events occurred. 
• While reading a book, plot locations in story or trace a route taken.
• Measure distance school bus takes along its daily route.  How many miles in a week, month, school year? 

Please share with us ways you can think to use Scribble Maps in your classroom.

Many websites offer teachers the capability of creating games and quizzes, but not many allow you to add your students and create groups AND view and analyze results. Kubbu does!

Kubbu is an e-learning tool designed to facilitate teachers’  work and enhance the learning process. 

Setup:
Teachers register (for free!) and then can create up to 30 student accounts.  Each student will login with the teacher’s username and the student’s password.  Students can be treated individually or assigned to groups.  If you create groups, you have the option of students creating their own accounts.

Create:
With Kubbu you create activities, crosswords, and quizzes for online practice, revision and examination.  With the free account, you are able to create up to 15 activities at one time.  Activities may be accessed online or may be printed out in paper form (with answer keys).  If created for online use, you can choose to set a time for which the activity must be completed. 
Categories of activities include:

• Match - extended form of the classic matching exercise.  It is ideal for language practice.  It helps assimilate new words, idioms, meanings, synonyms, etc.
• Divide - used when some notions, terms, concepts or definitions must be classified into categories or groups.
• Slider – a type of dynamic quiz. Its three activities include single and multiple choice questions, as well as a unique ‘climb up’ quiz.
• Composer - great for those who want to create their own concept of a quiz. You have the option of single and multiple choice questions, true or false questions, and fill in short answers.  You can even upload and add graphics and audio files making it  a multimedia interactive activity.
• Crossword – create puzzles with your own list of words

Visit the Samples page to see ways Kubbu can be used.

Track Progress:
After students have used the activities you created, you can track individual or group progress using the results database.  You can compare and sort results by different criteria and check on their results history.  Results are stored for 30 days.

Communicate & Share:
Using the built-in mail module you can email students inviting them to visit your page and to check out any new activities you have created.

You can create an online group space (class page) from which you can post messages and share files and materials with groups.

Teachers may share activities with other teachers by adding them to the Shared Activities catalogue.  You are able to import activities into your account and customize them if needed.  Use the search tool to find and use something that has already been created by another teacher.

Using the HTML code provided in the FAQs, you can provide a link on your website to the student account login page.

A couple notes: 
Inactive accounts will be deleted if they have been inactive for 60 days.
Use the ‘go back’ link within the program (top right corner) to go back.  Don’t use the back button on the browser.
You can upgrade your account by purchasing individual or group licenses which increases the number of student accounts, activities,  and storage space, as well as some other options.

This is a powerful online tool that you will find easy to use, students will enjoy using, and provides you with excellent data.

I love my job!  Today I discovered Wallwisher (http://wallwisher.com/) and am very excited to share this with my staff.  This free tool is very easy to use  - even students as young as Kindergarten can use it.

Wallwisher is an online notice board maker.  Think ’stickies’ on the web that anyone (if you so choose) can post.  Text on a stickie is limited to 160 characters, but you can also add web based images as well as audio and video files.  This is a wonderful tool for sharing thoughts.

You can post a note as a visitor or as a registered user.  Visitors can post anonymous notes, or type in their name .  (The names on these posts will have quotation marks around them.) Visitors can also be registered users by signing in using an email account.  Here at Parsley, all our students have a Gaggle.net email account. 

As the administrator of the account, you have a few options when creating your wall.  To create a wall, you add a title, and a subtitle which is where you can post a question.  You will also select an image choosing one from their gallery or uploading one of your own.  This image shows in the top left corner or your wall.  You select one of 12 color themes.  In the preferences box, you can add a URL, select who can see and post to the wall, and choose whether you want to approve a post before it appears on the wall.  If using this with your students, I would suggest choosing this option.  Total setup time shouldn’t take you more than 3 minutes.

Once created, you only need to share the URL of the wall with those you would like to post.  It will be easiest for students to access your wall if you add it to your website.    Double clicking on the wall brings up a new ’sticky’.  If logged in as a registered user, you just begin typing your comment.  If you are an unregistered visitor, you can type in your name (10 character limit so you may want to use first name only) or you can leave it anonymous.  Then you click in the message box and enter your post and then click the OK button when done.  In the bottom left corner of the post you will see the number of characters you have left.  Being limited to 160 characters is a good way to teach students to be concise in composing their comment.  If the 160 characters is not enough, the student could always post another comment.

If you have chosen to approve a comment before it is posted, all you have to do is login to your account and click the ‘Approve’ button on each post.  So that posts appear almost instantly, the teacher could leave her account open on one computer and approve each one as students leave a comment.  Owners also have the ability to edit a comment.

In addition to putting a link to your wall on your website or blog, you can also embed the wall by pasting the provided code in your website or blog.

You can create new walls as needed and delete those no longer relevant.

Stickies can be dragged around on the wall, however, they will only stay put when moved by the owner of the wall or the logged-in owner of the post.

Ideas for  use this in your classroom:

• At the beginning of the year, use it as a getting-to-know-you activity.
• Introduce a new unit.  Ask students what they already know about a topic. 
• Close a unit.  Ask them what they learned or found most interesting.
• Brainstorm.
• Take a poll.  Visitors could all be anonymous.  Then the teacher could graph the results and add the graph as an image in a post (after first uploading the image to the web).
• Post opinions about a current event  – one either in the news or a situation occuring at school.
• Reflect on a story or a charcter.
• Create a to-do list.
• Thank someone.  Have your students post thank you notes to volunteers and then send them an email with the URL.  You’ll make their day.
•  The teacher may choose to post an audio or video file and ask students to comment on it.

Wallwisher could also be used with an interactive whiteboard.

I hope you will take a few minutes to explore Wallwisher.  You’ll be glad you did.

Wordle (http://www.wordle.net/) is not a new resource to most of you, and though you may think it’s a cool web app., have you wondered just how you would use it in the classroom?  There are oodles of ways it can be used, and once you start to use it, I’ll bet you (and your students) find many ways to integrate it into daily activities.    

   For those of you not so familiar with Wordle, simply defined it is “ a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide.”  You can type in the desired text, enter the URL of a web page, or enter a del.icio.us user name to see their tags.    

Once created, you can print out the Wordle or take a screen shot and then save it as a graphic to later be added to your website, blog, wiki, etc.    

If you’ve never created a Wordle, I invite you to do so now… http://www.wordle.net/,  then come back and look at ways you can use it in your classroom.    

Now that you know how easy it is to create a Wordle, consider these ideas for ways to use it in your classroom.    

• Create notebook or report cover with vocabulary, adjectives, etc.
• Display poll results. Have each student type in their answer (favorite color, birth month, favorite subject, hardest spelling word, etc.) and then Wordle it to see the results in a different format.
•  Use as a new lesson/unit starter.  Have students guess, from text from the unit, where you’re going with your lesson and then they can create their own learning outcomes.
• Students can paste the text of a story they’ve written to see which words are used the most which may be an indicator of an overused word.
• Enter adjectives and descriptive phrases (see tip below) for an ‘All About Me” activity.  OR a student’s character traits (as submitted by classmates) could be entered to see which trait is most commonly used to describe the student.  OR, make a gift for Mom or Dad and Wordle words and phrases that make that person special. (Be sure to type the person’s name in several times so it will be the largest word in the Wordle.
• Instead of a Word Wall, try a Wordle Wall.
• Create Wordles with synonyms for overly used words like ’said’.
• Paste in text from a fairy tale and then have students guess the fairy tale.
• Wordle class expectations, rules, etc.
• A Wordle of inspirational words might make a nice iron-on transfer for a class t-shirt.
• Wordle a speech and see which words occur the most often.
• Before looking up a new word in the dictionary,  give your students the new vocabulary word and ask them to brainstorm all the words they associate with it. 
• Copy text from literature and then have students guess the main idea.
• Create a Wordle that will can be used for a different type of story prompt.
• “Excavate” text.  After Wordle has been created, you can right click on a word to remove it from the Wordle.  (See tip below)
• Create a custom header for your webpage or blog. 
• After creating a Wordle, take a screen shot and incorporate the image into a work or art.  May be pasted into to programs like Kid Pix.
• Use as a character study.  Type descriptive words and phrases for a character in literature.
• Instead of a ‘picture walk’ of a book, try a ‘Wordle walk’.
• Wordle lyrics to a song.
• Wordle a current event news article.
• Enter words from different types of speech.  Change all text color to white.  Print out once and copy.  Students can then color each part of speech a different color.
• This would be a fun way to practice your spelling words.
• At the beginning of  the school year, type the teacher’s name several times (to make it larger) and then each student’s first name for a visual of the members of the class.
• Using a photo editing program, make the background of the Wordle transparent and then overlay the Wordle over clipart or photograph.
• Wordle a holiday and all the things associated with it.

  Resources:    

http://techlearning.com/blogs/24518
http://www.ideastoinspire.co.uk/wordle.htm
http://www.slideshare.net/JenniferW/wordle-ideas    

Tips:     

• Use the tilde ~ between words that you want to keep together.  (i.e. word~cloud)
• If a large amount of text is used and you think  it will ‘clutter’  the Wordle, you can choose a setting to display ‘x’ number of the most often used words
• Before you press the ‘Go’ button, you might want to copy the text in case you have a problem with your computer or need to go back and edit. 
• After a Wordle has been created, you can delete words you don’t want to appear.

Wordle before edit

right click on word to be removed from Wordle

Today I discovered a new screenshots (screen capture) tool and it instantly became one of  ‘my favorite (web techie) things.

When I used Macs (until recently when I was forced to move to PC) I easily made screen shots of the whole visible window or just the part I wanted with just a few key strokes.  I then pulled them into Photoshop and edited for size and added notes if necessary.  With my PC, I can only take a screen shot of the visible window (alt+prt sc) which means I almost always had to crop in Photoshop before making other edits.  I miss my Mac…..

There are screen capture programs available for purchase and I do use one of those (Snagit) at school, but the free web tool I found today is amazingly easy to use and will be a great resource for teachers. Students could also learn to use this tool.

Aviary.com allows you to take a screen shot of the entire webpage, even the part you have to scroll to see.  To do so, use the web address aviary.com/TheWeb AddressYouWantToCapture.  Example:  http://aviary.com/www.freerice.com.

The web page will open within a workspace.  Use the tools to crop, draw ovals, rectangles, lines or arrows, add text, change colors, etc.  To move the image to the desired location you want to crop or edit, click and hold and drag the captured page up or down.   You can also use the zoom tool (bottom right) to zoom in and out of your image.

When done, you can save the screen shot to your computer and then later add to a document, your website, blog, etc.

Screen shots are an excellent way to illustrate, especially when you are writing directions.

If you are a Firefox user, you also have the option of adding an extension called Talon that gives you the screenshots capability added as a button on your browser.  With this button, you can capture a region on the page, the visible portion of the page, or the whole page.  You need to have an account to do this, but it is free to sign up.  (If you’ve read other posts to this blog, you know I like Firefox extensions.)

I hope you’ll try Aviary; if you are a screenshots user, you will become a fan. (How to remember the website… think ‘birds’. Birds = Aviary)

For many of us, myself included, summer vacation means an opportunity to read for fun!  After reading a book you really enjoyed, have you ever wondered what to read next? The website Book Seer may be just the answer!

Book Seer is a simple book suggester website.  Type in the book title and author and Book Seer pulls recommended books from Amazon and LibraryThing.

This site can be used for both children’s books as well as those for adults.

Book Seer will also provide a short link to your search results that you can then share with others.

Looking for a book to fit your mood?  Whichbook is a unique website that suggests books that match your preferences.  Slide up to four sliders from twelve preference choices and click Go and a list of suggested books that have been published since 1995 will be revealed.

You can also switch to the ‘character, plot, setting’ preferences to help you choose a book.