#5 Tool

Help!  Has anyone tried to use any of these animation tools or word tools at home?  I can't seem to get any of them to work.  I have used wordle, flickr, and huge labs before when I did 23 things, but they are not working tonight.  I will try again tomorrow, but I was just wondering if any one else was having the same problems???

Well, I finally got wordsift, google docs and blogger (obviously) to work.  I will still work on the others because they look like fun, but never got them working for me.  I have used blogger in my classroom by posting a blog of books that I thought students might have some interest in on my blog and have them comment.  That worked out well, but I think that I might try something more aggressive this year like a class blog or have students create their own blog and comment on others in the class.  I haven't exactly thought the whole thing through yet, so if you have ideas let me know.  I will look at other teacher's blogs so I can see what they are doing and maybe try out their ideas with blogs too!

I really liked the wordsift.  I have seen it before.  I think it would be a really good tool to use when teaching vocabulary words.  It may be too time consuming when you are introducing new words to use it for each one, but you may be able to use it as an example with one or two so they can use the tool at home.  It may even make a good project or study aid.  I wasn't able to embed it in my blog, so I don't have an example of it.  I am going to continue to work on that tomorrow too.

I tried wordsift while introducing vocabulary today.  It is blocked on the SBISD website, so I went to the virtual thesaurus and used that instead.  The students really liked it.  The only problem is that it only lets you view a few words before it makes you subscribe for a fee.

Yay!  I finally got my #5 tools to work!  Google Chrome didn't work, but Internet Explorer did.  Thanks for the idea Dana.  I never would have thought about that.  So, my picture from Big Labs is above and my Wordle is a gadet to the side.  I hope you enjoy these tools too!