Twitter
Twitter
is a social media site that allows you to update your status or ideas to the
world and your followers in 140 characters or less. Its overall purpose is to stay connected with those around
the world by tweeting news, opinions and stories. It’s used mostly by younger people – anyone with a smart
phone and is a great way to share a picture, video or interesting link. Jack Dorsey and some colleagues at Odeo
founded Twitter in March 2006. For
my personal use, it’s a great way to stay connected with friends and family far
away. Professionally there are
many educators and technology enthusiasts that share interesting articles,
great links, and much information that I find helpful with my own
teaching. www.twitter.com
YouTube or
Teacher Tube
YouTube was founded in 2005, as a site to share, view and comment
on videos uploaded and available to all. The three founders are Chad Hurley, Steven Chen and
Jawed Karim. Less than two years
of founding YouTube, they sold it to Google for 1.65 billion. The site is a great way to share
personal videos with friends, faraway family and your chance to show all those
funny family video clips. I think
it’s used widely by all ages of people.
Many videos have gone ‘viral’ and been viewed by millions of
viewers. I’ve used it in my
classroom to upload some class activities and share various clips I’ve
found. Though I have to be careful
about the content elsewhere on the page. Sometimes viewers’ comments or other video clips are
inappropriate for my audience. My
students are YouTube users as viewers and have their favorite clips they’ve watched
and enjoyed over and over. www.youtube.com
Flickr
Flickr
is a site to organize and share your photos and videos online. It was created in 2004 by the company
Ludicorp and bought by Yahoo a year later. I think mainly adults, owners of digital cameras, use
it. It’s also used by many
bloggers that want to embed pictures and videos into their blogs. I haven’t used Flickr before but
have used similar sites (Picasa, Shutterfly) personally and professionally, to
share pictures with parents and students on my school website. www.flickr.com
Picnik
Picnik is a photo-editing site that enables users to
edit their digital photos for free.
Most photo editing requires specific software to be bought and Picnik
was offering it all free and very user-friendly. Most Flickr users were also using Picnik if editing was
required. All was started by Darrin Massena and Mike Harrington in Seattle in
the fall of 2005. It was acquired
by Google in 2010 and is now being phased out as Google+ offers many photo
editing tools of its own. It will
be closed in April 2012. I haven’t used Picnik but could see
using something similar with my students when we incorporate images into their
work and projects. Knowing how to
edit, crop, and resize pictures are important skills that will be useful in
school and life. www.picnik.com
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is
a free, editable, online encyclopedia and is available in multiple
languages. It started as an
offshoot of Nupedia, the first online attempt at an encyclopedia, and began in
2001. It is different from a
regular encyclopedia in that all can edit its content and content s being added
daily. There are potential
problems with inaccurate info or vandalism of information occurring but the
company has put many measures in place to minimize this. I think it’s used universally and by a
wide range of ages. It’s easy to
read and so vast in the topics available.
If only a little info is needed, it’s an easy quick stop. I’ve used it in class minimally as I
try to push my students to go elsewhere in their research. I could be using it more often as it’s
so user-friendly. www.wikipedia.org
.
Jing
Jing
is an online tool that helps you take screenshots and screencasts and share
them instantly. It is just one of many
screenshot/cast tools available through TechSmith, a company that released the
Jing Project in 2007.
I see a variety of purposes with this tool, useful to anyone that is
sharing info to an audience of some sort. I think it’s a great tool for any teachers, trainers,
or anyone that has skills and strategies to cover in a visual, interesting
way. I have never used it myself but see some huge potential in
creating short videos of math strategies, getting screenshots of various maps
we label and edit in class to share as a study tool and enhance my students’
learning experiences. I think my students like creating
the screencasts themselves and the topic areas to cover are endless. I would like to do more research on
this site and hope to learn more by watching tutorials and trying it out
myself. http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html
Slideshare
Slideshare
is an online source for uploading and sharing power points, presentations and
other documents. It began in
October 2006 and has a long list of users – Fortune 500 companies, the White
House and other govt agencies and many, many bloggers. I have not used the site
before but think it would be a great way to share the presentations I have
created for parents and students in the past. I think the potential of content I can add to my website
gives my students more tools to work with independently and this site would be
a good start. http://www.slideshare.net/
Wordle
Wordle is
a site that offers a visual way to share writing, thinking and collaborative
work through ‘word clouds.’ I’ve
used this site many times in my classroom and students LOVE it! It was created in 2008, as a version of
a tag cloud, by Jonathon Feinberg, a senior engineer at IBM. I’ve used wordle to collect big ideas
at the beginning and end of a unit, as reflection of a common experience, as an
icebreaker in sharing about ourselves and there are numerous other potential
possibilities. I think
it’s used by many students, teachers, schools, bloggers and anyone hoping to
capture someone’s attention with the visual appeal of wordle. http://www.wordle.net/
Museumbox
Museumbox
is an online tool to create a virtual box of information, pictures and
artifacts surrounding an idea of importance. This could be a person, a historical topic or a
controversial topic. Boxes created
can contain text, pictures, sounds and video to present a thorough and creative
view of a specific topic. I was
unable to find out information on its founder but see Thomas Clarkson, an
abolitionist that helped slaves escape to freedom, inspired the whole project. I think teachers and students are the
biggest users of this tool and have registered my school in hopes I will be a
user soon. I haven’t used this
site but hope to use it in the future as an alternative way for students to
present their researched information.
One unit in particular I think it would lend itself well is my students’
study of European explorers. I
think the hunt for creative items to add to the box would be an entertaining
challenge for most.
