Thing #19

There were a lot of fun tools on the Web 2.0 Awards List. I thought the One Sentence True Stories site was an interesting concept. It is just like the title says: people submit one sentence stories about themselves, like, "My dad stopped complaining about my bad grades when I won $100 for a short story I wrote out of boredom during math class." It might have been good for teaching main idea or elaboration, but most of the posts I saw were not appropriate for children. Maybe we can use a spin-off of the idea on a class wiki page.

Yourminis has some fun widgets you can add to home pages and blogs. I added Shoutcast Radio by AOL onto my iGoogle page. You can use it to listen to live radio. In the "easy listening" genre, there is a link to BirdSongRadio.com. Maybe my class can listen to it while they're working on research projects next year. (What would we do without our bird unit?!)

Picnik is the tool I played with the most. It is a photo image program. It provides basic services for free. It is a little like Mosaic Maker and some of the other photo image tools on Big Huge Labs, but I found it easier to navigate. Here are some fun things I could do with uploaded pictures:

(normal, heat sensitive, and neon)

You can use up to 5 pictures at a time, and the pictures don't have to all be in a row like I have them. The children could use this tool to illustrate writing projects, show time progression, or make flow charts.