Tuesday, January 10, 2012

My Continued Thoughts

For the last week, my students have been working on completing digital fairytales.  I came across a very kid-friendly site, Little Bird Tales, that I decided on having my students use.  I liked that I was able to set up an account that gave me "admin-like" privileges and create accounts for each of my students and have access to what they are working on.  It has been a bit more of a process than I had expected, mostly the art-work portion, but it is all working out as we continue on with the final days.  

I have continued to enjoy using Twitter to grow professionally.  I definitely retweet more than writing my own messages because of the great things that I have come across.  The RSS feeds aren't getting as much of my attention as I thought they might, due to it being a "one-stop-shop" for staying up current.  However,  right now it just seems like one more thing to add to the list. At some point, when things slow down (yeah, right) I may get more into checking my RSS feeds, but it is between Twitter and RSS, my vote is Twitter.

4 comments:

  1. Jess,
    My vote is twitter too. I noticed I started tweeting more about education things and get some responses. At first I did not like the twitter idea, but with some other classmates following me I actually like it, since I be on it so much. I also like how you mentioned the little bird tales. I attempted to look but I kept getting an error message. I will try later tonight again. I think its great to have your students create digital fairytales. How is that coming along? You teach 2nd grade?

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  2. Thanks for your thoughts about the post. The site for digital storytelling has been having some server issues and has been in and out a little the last few days. It seems to be working again, and thank goodness during the school day. I teach third grade. The project was a bit more tedious than I thought, but mostly because of the art/illustration component. It takes a lot of teacher assistance but they are looking great. I am excited to share the finished products!

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  3. The resounding opinion from talking to classmates and others is that having both an RSS Reader AND Twitter is information overload so your post about "choosing one" backs that up. I, too, thought it was necessary to choose one. I chose an RSS Reader for various reasons but I will admit that one of the nice things about Twitter was that it was easier to check because you have many, many ways in which the Tweets can come to you. The hurdle that I have to overcome with the RSS Reader is finding an easy way to remind myself to check it. Zac suggested putting it in iGoogle and making it the home page so that you are forced to see it so we'll give it a try and see if I can stay sane, lol.

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  4. Another digital storytelling site you might like is http://storybird.com/ They have a nice selection of artwork to choose from and then you make up a story from those.

    See http://storybird.com/teachers/ for more information. You can sign up students without them having email.

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