Prezi - Create Stunning Presentations

Prezi is a presentation tool that can be used as a refreshing alternative to the traditional linear slide show. Rather than walking an audience through a series of slides, Prezi uses one canvas to zoom from idea to idea and engage viewers with every twist and turn along the way. This user-friendly tool can be used by students to construct knowledge, tell a story, or as a tool to persuade. Watch this quick video to understand why you should consider using Prezi . Let your students create!

View an interesting Prezi sample:
Digital Learners Becoming Digital Educators, by Eitan Benzaquen

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Wild About Wikispaces

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A wiki is a website that allows members to easily edit and contribute content. Wikispaces is a tool I'm wild about for collaborative learning for some good reasons.

Wikis are virtual classrooms for the 21st Century Learner
Members of a wikis spend time reading, writing, editing and publishing their work and the work others from locations near and far. Students enjoy writing and creating for an audience and a wiki offers an exciting way for them to become engaged in real world learning. 


Wikis widgets provide opportunities to support all learners
A simple widget lets you embed an abundance of Web 2.0 tools into any page in order to provide students with multiple and flexible means of becoming engaged in learning. This means a wiki can be a tool used to support RtI and Universal Design for Learning.


Templates provide consistent formatting options
Wants students to have a starting point for a project with prompts, directions and formatting? Want your colleagues to provide standard information on a wiki page? Good news! You can save time and provide a consistent page format for contributors by creating templates. A wiki template is like a virtual copy machine.

No email account for students is required
Free upgrades to K-12 educator accounts are ad free and they provide the opportunity for teachers to add users, which means students do not need an email account to fully contribute.

View my glog of wiki projects to see  examples of some of the fabulous ways teachers in D97 are using wikis.


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Glog On!

Glog On! - U97 Wksp. on Jan. 4th

Glogster has become a fairly popular tool in D97 because it is versatile and it provides users with multiple means of engagement. I sent out a Call to Gloggers in search of samples and then created a glog of Glogs.

View Glog On and watch it grow!

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Coolest Tools of 2010

Time to reflect on some of the coolest tools...

Diversions
Sporcle.com - A place to go for mentally stimulating diversions
Keep your mind active and use it to master one of many timed quizzes on your favorite topic. An added challenge is in the spelling skills required. Remember, it's Sporcle with a c, not a k.

Fruit Ninja HD if you need a 2 minute break and have easy access to an iPad, try this app. to experience the joy of slicing fruit and watching it splat. Although it is best played on an iPad, you can also get it for your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Networking
ePals / twitter / delicious
It took a long time for me to figure out how to use Twitter, but after publishing a collaborative learning project in ePals and connecting to Twitter through ePals I received 22 inquires about the project in one day and I also found a few people talking about the project in Delicious. Wow, now I get it!

Collaborative Learning Space 
Wikispaces offers a free and simple educator platform with plenty of possibilities for engaging students in virtual work because it includes widgets for easy integration of user-friendly web 2.0 tool.

Primary Communication Tool 
Still Blogger, a quick and easy tool for frequently updating content and maintaining a web presence.

 Best Blogger Gadget: Picture gadget w/link

Publishing Student Work 
VoiceThread and an avatar provide a great way to launch student work so it is live and worldwide.  A bag of avatar resources can be found in my Bag Stream tab.

Staying Organized
EverNote is a well-organized place in the cloud accessible from any computer or Apple mobile device.

Presentation Tool
Prezi,  a nonlinear presentation tool that requires the designer to redefine and construct knowledge in the process of building it. The end product is quite engaging for an audience.

Social Bookmarking Tools 

With so many choices available I've used my favorite tool, Bag the Web, to put together a bag of social bookmarking tools to find the right tool to match your brain.
Check out the Bag Stream tab at the top of this blog for more bags of useful tools.

Muti-Media Tool for Students

Glogster.edu is still a great and free tool which allows students to create multi-media posters from the resources available on the web. Student account management features make this a very versatile and safe tool.

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Research: Create a customized search tool

As educators we are faced with the challenge of teaching students to use the Internet effectively. With so much information available, it's important to bring relevant and reliable resources into the classroom and also to teach our students how to conduct a search. Google offers a cool tool to assist with both tasks.

The Goggle Custom Search Tool allows you to easily build your own search engine customized with content for your grade level or for a particular unit of study. The tool helps you teach students to search for information, but it limits the search to websites you have chosen as appropriate. It can be embed into your own blog, wiki, or site.

Do teach students that the customized search tool only searches websites you have identified, and consider allowing them to build a custom search of their own when teaching them how to evaluate reliable websites.

Try this example, created for finding information about Regions of the United States.

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Go to Google Custom Search

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Wikis for collaborative learning

A wiki is a website that allows visitors to easily add, remove, and edit content, making it an effective tool for collaborative authoring which allows students to construct knowledge. There's no need for software, all you need is an Internet-connected computer to contribute, which makes a wiki a great tool for the classroom that's open 24/7. Uses in education are abundant. Here are a few examples from our own backyard:

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CurateUs: Share Web Content Visually

CurateUs is a tool for visually sharing content on the web. With the click of a button, this cool tool makes it easy to legally take a snapshot of a website, add a sticky note to it, and embed it into your blog along with automatically generated attribution and a backlink to the original site. There's more, CurateUs also lets you quickly grab a quote from the web and publish it along with the attribution and backlink.

Example: Embedded clip w/attribution and backlink

Clipped from: davidwarlick.com (share this clip)

Example: Quotation with annotation and backlink

The only thing that is one to one that we should be concerned with is equitable access to rigorous, relevant, and irresistible learning experiences that reflect and harness the times, environment, and ultimate goals of the learning.

From davidwarlick.com (share this quote)

Go to CurateUs (formerly known as Clipsy)

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Web 2.0 in the Classroom, by Ryan McCallum

Please give it a minute to load, then push play below...

Web 2.0 in the classroom on Prezi

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A look at Institute Day

Session Titles & Descriptions-11/20/10

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Cool Tools on Institute Day

Driven by NETS-T, Digital Leaders and instructional tech folks have been busy collaborating to prepare sessions designed to help teachers leverage technology to meet district goals and initiatives. Cool Tools will be featured throughout the day. Stay tuned for our wiki, filled with session resources.

Location: Brooks Middle School

Time: 8:00-1:00, no lunch

• Session 1: Keynote, Burke Hatch
• Session 2: Breakout session, 80 minutes
• Session 3: Breakout session, 80 minutes

Online registration is scheduled to open on Tuesday, November 16th. 

Stay tuned to your email for more information.

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Cool Tools on Institute Day - Nov. 24, 2010

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Digital Leaders are building a wiki of resources for the sessions we will be offering on Institute Day. The sessions are designed to help teachers and administrators leverage technology to meet district goals and initiatives. Cool Tools will be featured throughout the day. Watch our wiki grow!

Registration opens Nov. 14th

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Wordle and Current Events

Wordle is a great tool for beginning a discussion about current events. Here is what happened when I wordled election results from the Chicago Tribune, The State Journal-Register, and The Associated Press this morning.

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