Book Reports - 5840: January 2012

Sunday, 29 January 2012

Prezi

Prezi is a new program that was launced in 2009. It is a great way to present material. I prefer it over PowerPoint presentations because students are forced to do more presenting. There is nothing more boring than reading from you slides in PowerPoint.
Prezi’s stated mission is to “make sharing ideas more interesting”.
Prezi is a visually appealing presentation software, which can be used by teachers and students. There are free public and education versions, as well as a paid version which gives more options. Prezi has a "zoomable canvas" that can uniquely take the viewers along a visual path of information, and show the viewer how ideas are connected. Prezi also gives you the capability to embed images, YouTube videos, PDFs, and other media into your presentation. You may use a template or create your own original format to organize your ideas and content.

Charlotte's Web on Prezi

Friday, 27 January 2012

Comic Life

I will often use Comic Life with my grade one students...that is how easy it is to use! If you can click and drag a picture, you can make impressive comics! The students found pictures, imported them to Comic Life made the speech bubbles and ta-da! Instant finished product!

Tuesday, 24 January 2012

Wordle

Wordle is a terrific way for reluctant writers to share the love of a book that they have read. It is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. I typed the name of the book and the main characters 3 times to make them appear larger. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

Tagxedo

With Tagxedo you type in all of the words that you feel are important to re-telling the story.

For Charlotte's Web we typed:

Charlotte's Web award-winning childrens~book E.B. White, Pig Wilbur Saved intelligent~spider Charlotte book illustrations Garth~Williams Novel story pig Wilbur friendship barn~spider Charlotte Wilbur danger farmer writes~messages praising "Some Pig" let~him~live Classic children's~literature enjoyable children slaughter

Words we wanted to keep together in the Tagxedo we seperated with a tildy (found beside the #1 key) Words we wanted to appear larger we typed more than once.

Presentation / New Technology

SlideRocket - The New Way To Present SlideRocket is a great new presentation tool. It is free, fun and easy! I like that you can import your previous PowerPoint presentations. You can also import images for quick and easy sharing or import as editable files. These are fully compatible with SlideRocket. I also like that SlideRocket's is always available. Online, offline or mobile you can login, access your presentations 24x7. Although I have never tried using SlideRocket as a collaborative tool, I will certainly be trying this feature! Live embedded data in the slides is also a nice feature. I have embed live Twitter feeds and a video. YouTube videos ran flawlessly. An industry first, SlideRocket analytics lets you measure your presentation effectiveness by showing you who viewed and what they did as a result. To me this would be a great feedback feature in a classroom and it would keep fellow students focused on the presentation.

Photostory

Untitled from Liz Loewen on Vimeo.

Bring your digital photos to life with Photo Story 3. Create a photo slideshow of your book reports most memorable moments. You can capture the beginning, middle & end as well as the setting, main characters, problem and solution just the way you want them. With a single click, you can touch-up, crop or rotate pictures. It's that easy. Then, add stunning special effects, sountracks and personalize your stories with titles and captions. Start sharing your stories today. I have spent hours trying to figure out how to share a Photostory on a blog. My friend Leslie introduced me to Vimeo. I dropped my Photostory into Vimeo and was then able to embed it in my blog! If you know another way to share Photostory, please do share!

Go Animate

GoAnimate.com: Go Animate- Charlotte's Web by librarian liz

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun! GoAnimate state-of-art animation tools are perfect to complement your teaching and get your students to put learning into practice. GOANIMATE lets students create short, animated films and publish them on the Internet. The online software is easy to figure out and simple to use, and the cartoon characters can be made to perform a wide variety of actions and show plenty of entertaining emotions and reactions. Students can choose from a collection of stock characters, many drawn from well known TV shows or video games, or upload their own graphics. Students can write and record dialogue, move the characters, direct the camera, add music and sound effects - all with drag & drop tools! I found this program really easy to use with my grade 4 students.