Thursday, July 29, 2010

Tool #3: Image Generators and Mashups

This summer I went to one of those professional developments that lasts a week. And when you're on your way there, you're thinking, well even if this is terrible at least it takes care of my hours For The Entire Year. And sometime they turn out terrible and sometimes they are tolerable. And sometimes they are amazing. This one was amazing. Every afternoon after we had learned so much about East Asian literature that we were sure our brains were exploding, they had a session with ideas on how to use this in our classes. One of the cool things that I thought could be used for everything was Dinosaur Comics, which is the same images every day, but different writing about something not at all to do with the images, which is really funny. She gave her students blank dinosaur comics and had them write their own captions having to do with the literature. We tried it. It was fun.

So I thought it would be cool to use this tool to have the students create their own comics based on the literature. Or on biology or history or whatever, really.

Here is what I did with it (the picture is my own):

bearcomics

I also used this tool to spell my name:

M letter S . Caslon metal type letter a R. B U letter C K letter L metal type letter e

Because I thought it was cool. I suppose you could use this for headers on projects. Or for word walls. What would you used it for?

Tool #2: Community and Blogging

1. What are your thoughts about building an online education community and participating in a PLN? I am a huge fan of using online resources to create an educational community. I think this is important for our students to be involved in as well since this is where our world is heading.

2. What point stood out to you from the commenting advice? I really liked the idea in Cool Cat Teacher Blog about teaching students commenting. When my students used blogs last year they were required to comment on each other's writing. We didn't really spend time on how to comment, we really focussed on writing in general, so the comments suffered.

3. What five blogs did you select for your comments? (you may need to come back and add this information later by editing this post.) Yes, yes I will.