iLearn Technology

What it is: DomoNation is a free animation website that is powered by Go! Animate.  The site is very intuitive to use and makes impressive cartoon animations.  Students can create animations with backdrops, characters, dialogue, props, music, and special effects.  Students can create on scene or several to make up their animation.    The interface is very simple to learn, the drag and drop platform will be familiar to students.  To make their cartoon come to life, each character has a set of actions and emotions that can be added by clicking on the character and choosing from a drop down menu.  Special effects, such as weather occurrences or zooming, are simple to add to the project.  Animations can be saved for personal or public view on the DomoNation site. This is an impressive little web application that makes students the director of their very own movie.

How to integrate DomoNation into the classroom: Allow students to present their knowledge creatively using DomoNation instead of requiring the traditional report, diorama, or poster plastered with pictures and information.  Students can create an impressive alternative book report by creating an animated book talk, interviewing a character from the story, or re-creating an important scene in the story.  Students can display their knowledge about a historical figure by “interviewing” the historical person of interest or an eye-witness of a historical event.  DomoNation would be a great platform for creating public service announcements (how about the importance of hand washing with the H1N1 outbreak?) or short video commercials that persuade in a debate. Students can write a screen play and then transform it into an  animation. Animations are also a great way to illustrate vocabulary words and story problems in math.  In the foreign language classroom, students can create short cartoons practicing the new vocabulary they are learning.   The possibilities are endless!  Hold a DomoNation premier party day in your classroom so that students can watch each other’s finished animations and learn from their peers.

Tips: Direct your students to the Create page of DomoNation, some of the content created by other users may not be appropriate for your school.

Related Resources: Kerpoof, Shidonni, XtraNormal, DoInk

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using DomoNation in your classroom.

What it is:  My Story Maker is an amazing interactive website created for the Carnegie Libraries of Pittsburgh.  My Story Maker is an interactive story book where students are in charge of creating a story.  Students choose characters, and a genre and then begin telling a story.  The students create the story by dragging and dropping characters, objects, and backgrounds into their story.  The characters can have emotions and perform actions with the different objects and interact with each other.  As students drag different elements to the story book, a story is written for them based on what is happening in the pictures.  When they are finished, they have created an interactive book that they can read and share with friends.

How to integrate My Story Maker into the classroom:   My Story Maker is a fantastic interactive tool to get students creating a story.  What I love about this website is the way that it encourages students to create by first thinking about the elements of a story (who will it be about?, what kind of story will it be?, what happens first?, what happens next?).  This is a great tool to use to help students understand the importance of beginning, middle, and end, setting, supporting details, and dialogue.  My Story Maker would be fun to use to create a whole class story using an interactive whiteboard.  Students could take turns adding elements to the story and reading the story aloud.  As students create the class story, be sure to keep them thinking about the setting, plot, and characters.  My Story Maker can also be used individually on classroom computers or in a computer lab setting.  The written story will be very basic “Fox threw a ball to lion.”  Encourage students to embellish their stories with vivid verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.  When students are finished with their story they can download it, share it with others, preview it, or print it. 

Tips:  I learned about this site from Kevin Jarrett’s excellent blog.  Check it out for great tips and inspiration for your classroom!

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using My Story Maker in your classroom.

What it is: Creaza is a suite of web-based creativity tools.  There are four tools in the Creaza toolbox that will help your students organize knowledge and tell stories in new creative ways.  Mindomo is the mind mapping tool.  Students can use this tool to organize thoughts, ideas, links, and other information visually.  Mindomo is the perfect tool for exploring new material, looking at connections, and organizing thoughts for further development.  The mind map topics can contain media files, links, and text.  Cartoonist is a cartooning tool that students can use to create multimedia stories.  Cartoonist can be used to create comic strips or more personal digital narratives.  The finished product can be viewed online or printed out.  (Check out the video demo to learn how to use this tool.)  Movie Editor helps students produce their own movies based on Creaza’s thematic universes, video, images, and sound clips.  Students can use the Movie Editor to edit a short film, create a news cast, a commercial, a film trailer, etc.  Movie Editor can import film clips, sound clips and images to tell a story.  Audio Editor is the final tool in Creaza’s creative suite.  Audio Editor is a tool that allows your students to produce audio clips.  Students can use Audio Editor to splice together their own newscasts, radio commercials, radio interlude, etc.

How to integrate Creaza into the classroom:  Creaza is a great suite of online tools that allow students to display learning creatively.  The Media and Audio editors follow established conventions for sound and media editing complete with timelines.  Using this online software will be a nice introduction to more robust media and audio editors.  Mindomo is a great way for students connect new and existing knowledge.  It is also a nice place for students to plan out a story.  Cartoonist and Movie Editor are great tools that provide students with a creative outlet for telling a story.  Allow students to show their understanding of a period in history by creating a cartoon about it.  Display a new science concept in Movie Editor complete with voice over.  Students could create a short video or radio type commercial for a book that they read in place of a traditional book report.  The uses for are limitless, you will think of many ways for your students to use this creative suite to display knowledge.

Tips:  Cartoonist is the only tool that has a video demo, this is a great way to teach your students how to teach themselves.  Encourage students to learn how to use this tool by watching the video demo first and working with the tool.  Movie Editor does take a little bit of playing with to figure out how to use it, give your students a day to play with the tools so that they get a handle on how it all works.  

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Creaza in your classroom.

What it is:  The APTE Curious Minds Click website lets students and teachers create e-puzzles that can be sent and played online.  You can create your own online Crosswords, Word Scrambles, Anagrams, and Secret Codes.  These puzzles can then be played online and sent as an email.

How to integrate APTE Curious Minds Click into the classroom:   Create your own online puzzles for students to play based on any curriculum or subject you are studying.  Puzzles are a fun way for students to practice new vocabulary, spelling words, and new content.  Students can create their own puzzles based on curriculum for classmates to solve.  Students will love creating puzzles for their classmates and solving puzzles that have been created for them.  

Tips: In addition to creating your own puzzles, you can solve puzzles that others have created.

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using APTE Curious Minds Click  in your classroom.

What it is:  Ever wish you could create your own video sharing site?  Fliggo is your answer.  Create a video sharing site in under 5 minutes easily!  Sharing student created videos on YouTube is not always an option in the school system.  YouTube may be blocked, you may have concerns about other video content, or the related videos that are presented to your students may be inappropriate.  Fliggo is the answer.  You can create a video sharing site for your school complete with school logo.  Fliggo gives you control over who can post videos, who can comment, and how videos are approved.  Fliggo is simple enough to use with elementary students!

How to integrate Fliggo into the classroom:  Fliggo is the perfect place to upload student created video.  I have students turn every Keynote presentation into a video so that we can share it online.  Students love sharing their work with the world.  I get emails from parents, grandparents, and other family members about how excited they are to see what their kids are working on in school.  This is an awesome way to showcase student work.  Students can comment on other student work encouraging an authentic classroom community.  Fliggo is easy enough for elementary students to upload their own videos if you choose to allow member uploaded video.  In my classroom, students create commercials on a variety of topics.  I like using commercials because students understand their purpose (to advertise), they are short, and they quickly get the point across.  Students have created commercials in my classroom for a multiude of subjects and topics.  

Tips:  I love the idea of creating a school “YouTube” type site, your students and parents will love it too!

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Fliggo  in your classroom.

What it is:   Digital Vaults reminds me of Museum Box that I wrote about a few weeks ago.  The National Archives has put together an amazing site where students can create digital content with primary resources.  Students can search photographs, documents, and other records and collect them.  Students can use collected items to create their own digital poster or to make a movie.  Students can also create a Pathway Challenge.  In a challenge, students create a series of clues that show relationships between photographs, documents and other records.  Others can take part in these Pathways Challenges.  There are also ready made challenges that students can take part in, I just took the Lincoln challenge.  Clues are given and students have to find a record that matches the clue.  Very cool!

How to integrate Digital Vaults into the classroom:  This is a truly incredible way for students to interact with history.    While the site may be too hard for primary elementary students to use on their own, the Lincoln Pathway Challenge could be used with an interactive whiteboard with the teacher guiding the challenge.  Teachers could also create a unique challenge that directly matches your curriculum for students to complete.  The poster, movie, and create your own Pathway Challenge are an engaging way for students to learn about history in a hands on approach.  Give students a direction to go and then give them time to collect resources, and create their digital history vault.  This is not history as I remember it…in fact, I’m sure I would know much, much more about history if I were involved in my learning this way!  This is so much better than learning history from an outdated text book, the Pathway Challenges are like virtual field trips through history.

Tips:  I learned about this awesome website from Free Technology for Teachers, a great blog!

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Digital Vaults in your classroom.

What it is:  Picasa is a free download from Google that helps you organize, edit, share, and create using photos.  The edit feature allows you to fix red-eye, crop, and fix any blemishes or scratches.  Picasa lets students create turning photos into movies, collages, and slideshows.  Picasa also makes it easy to upload albums to the web to share.  Picasa has been around for a while as a Google tool but the big news this week is the release of the beta version of Picasa for Macs.  The neat thing about the Mac Picasa release is its integration with iPhoto.  The features are pretty neat and definitely worth a look for either platform but with the announcement of iPhoto ‘09 yesterday, they aren’t as impressive.  HOWEVER, Picasa is completely free while iPhoto ‘09 is not.

How to integrate Picasa into the classroom:  Picasa  is a great way to organize photos you are taking of your classroom in action.  Create a web album, parents always like to see the great things their kids are learning.  Students can use Picasa to organize images they find online or pictures they take on a field trip.  These pictures can then be used to create a movie, collage, or slideshow directly in the Picasa software.  Students could create a class story in pictures, create a movie out of it and share it with other grades.  Students can also collect historical images, scientific images, etc and easily create a movie or slideshow displaying their knowledge.  

Tips:  Picasa is available for Macs in beta version and Windows and Linux based in alpha.  

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Picasa in your classroom.

What it is:  Lunarpages is a web hosting web service that offers free hosting to k-12 educators and schools!  The free web hosting is intended to be used by teachers only (individual student web hosting is not available).  Lunarpages will provide a free web builder, free unlimited phone and email support, unlimited email addresses and FTP accounts, 500MB of storage, 20GB data transfer, and one free domain name registration for each account.   The only stipulation?  You must have a banner ad somewhere on the site that says that Lunarpages donated the site…thats it!  

How to integrate Lunarpages into the classroom:  Lunarpages hosting is an excellent option for those of you who enjoy building your websites with software like iWeb.  It is also an excellent option for a class website built with the web builder Lunarpages provides.  Classroom websites are an outstanding way to communicate with parents and students about the goings on in your classroom.

Tips:   The free web hosting is only available for k-12 public schools. Learn about how to get your free web hosting with Lunarpages here.

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Lunarpages in your classroom.

What it is:   Primary Access is a tool I learned about today while attending one of the K12 Online conference sessions.  This incredible site has a web-based tool that offers students and teachers simple access to digital images and materials that provides them the opportunity to create personal narratives.  The idea behind the site is that if students are offered primary source documents, they develop better historical thinking skills.  I highly recommend you watch the presentation on k12 Online, to see just how accurate this belief was in a case study of the site.  Students use Primary Access to create digital movies (historical narratives) that help add to meaningful learning experiences.  The site is very simple to use, intuitive enough that even a student (or teacher) who has never created a digital movie would be successful.  

How to integrate Primary Access into the classroom:   Use Primary Access as a tool to bring history to life for your students.  Using the site, students can create a short digital movie that explores some event in history.  The digital movie will only be 1-3 minutes in length and can contain images, text, movies, and narration recorded in the students own voice.  Students have a place to write, research, narrate, view, and search a time line and idea map right in Primary Access.  The finished product is educational and entertaining for the creator and viewers.  The results with this site are truly amazing!  It really does bring history to life.

Tips: It isn’t obvious how to create a teacher account on Primary Access, to create an account go to http://primaryaccess.org/teacher.

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Primary Access  in your classroom.

What it is: Novel Games provides free Flash games that can be embedded on any website. There is a long list of games that you can embed from World capitals game, typing games, to Sudoku and other great math games. Search the list of games, you are sure to find many that fit your needs. Because you can embed the games on your website, students can easily access the games from school and home.

How to integrate Novel Games into your curriculum: There is such a variety of high quality, FUN, educational games that integrating them into your curriculum will be varied as well. An example of how I am using the Novel Games in my classroom can be found at www.typing.weebly.com. My students are learning how to keyboard. Because I don’t want to spend my year teaching only keyboarding I offered my students a challenge. Practice typing at home and come participate in a Typing Olympics (where only touch typing is allowed) and you won’t have to spend your computer time learning to touch type. I am at a private school so the best prize that can be offered is a break dress code day. The fastest touch typer’s in each class will get to break dress code on a day when no one else does. Students can practice typing using these practice games I have provided. The games are perfect as part of the Typing Olympics because they give a final score…easy to tell who the winners are! Most of the games are perfect for practicing a skill and will inevitability get kids doing homework voluntarily because they are so much fun to play.

Tips: Don’t have your own website to embed the flash games? Create a free one today using a site like www.weebly.com. To embed a player simply highlight and copy the code from Novel games and paste in an HTML editor in a site like Weebly. Make sure that your students have the latest Flash player installed or the games won’t work properly.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Novel Games in your classroom.