ePal!

After viewing the ePals website, I can think of many ways I would use this site in my classroom. Many school districts have a problem with allowing teachers and students access social networking site such as Facebook, Twitter, and even site like YouTube. While I understand the dangers that the administration sees in allowing access to these sites, I think there is a huge disadvantage as well. With a site like ePal, teachers would be able to do many of the things they want to do but can't.

For example, the ePal Learning Space is, "a virtual workspace optimized for creating, sharing, managing, and collaborating on educational content". This portion of the website allows teachers to safely email students, set up blogs, wikis, and other media tools while being able to monitor the content their students are subjected to. In addition, teachers can upload files (i.e. Word or PDF's) so that they will never hear the excuse of "I lost the original copy of my assignment so I couldn't do it," and also the most famous, "I didn't know that was due." Parents can also utilize this learning space by joining different communities or just checking to see what their children are doing in a specific class. With many built in language and content filters, the ePal Learning Space provides a safe environment for students to collaborate with their peers and teachers.

I can definitely see myself using the Learning Space to keep in contact with parents, to create wikis for my students, and also to set up blogs. With wikis and blogs, I could give my kids extra out of class help or step by step directions for assignments they are having problems with. The good thing about this program is everything is structured and the school district has the option to monitor the collaboration between students, teachers, and parents. I would definitely use this program in the classroom.

Wonderful World of Flickr

I can't say enough about how I would use FlickR in the English classroom! Sites like these excite me because they can be used in a multitude of ways. One way would be in the form of digital storytelling. After collecting my photos from flickr, I would use websites such as animoto to compile my pictures so that they would be able to tell my story. For example, instead of using PowerPoint to create a picture slideshow, I could use animoto instead, and set all my flickr pictures to music (with transitions included) easily to tell whatever story I wanted. Here is a one I made about pie eating just for fun!

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

In addition to using flickr for digital storytelling, I could use flickr as a final project for my English students. For example, bighugelabs takes photos from flickr and allows the user to create movie posters, magazine covers, cd covers, or even a comic book! After reading a novel, one of my final projects could be to create one of the previously mentioned objects in order to summarize the essence of the book. Here is a movie poster I made using flickr for the novel Catcher in the Rye:

Would you go see it?

I find that students are very enthusiastic when they use technology they are familiar with for final projects. I have used imovie before and their products turned out well so I have no doubt in my mind using flickr for a final project would turn out awesome products!