Thing 2 Animoto Book Trailer

Voicethread

Found this great idea to update our fourth grade fractured fairy tale project by moving it to Voicethread.com This is an example of a story written and performed by 2nd grade students.
Adventures of Baby Bob

Thing 20 - video

Youtube -- familiar territory at last! And I have also used Zamzar before to show a Youtube video at school. Blinkx is amazing, but I think Google Video has more search power which, as always, is both a blessing and a curse. The Portal to Texas History will be very helpful with fourth grade Texas history classes as well. I knew the website but the trailer is fun.

Teacher Tube is new to me and it probably is not blocked at my school. It has much less offensive material, but not nearly the choice in imho. I think it is fantastic for finding out what other schools are doing with video and I really think we'll be making a claymation video, or a storytelling video this coming school year. Here is one example I found.



I sure hope this works. I've always loved this Leo Lionni story.

Here is another video discovered via the Cool Cat Teacher blog on a new way to teach at Woodland Parks High School in Colorado - lectures at home and homework done at school, a flipped classroom.

Thing 11 - Library Thing

This was an easy one. IT was a piece of cake to add titles to my catalog. I like having the widget to pop right from my blog to my catalog on Library Thing. In the Thingology blog I read an interesting comment on mashtags perhaps taking the place of traditional catalog entries one day, or at least bridging the gap. I'm going to try to put more care into tagging here, and in my catalog on Library Thing. I also read about the possibilities of using Library Thing for Readers Advisory Services. That really looks promising down the road as more titles are put in. Right now I just have the five books on my desk in there so I'll need to put in a few more to find a "kindred spirit" to share titles with. The Zeitgeist tab brought up some interesting data, but I think the figures just apply to the actual users of the site in terms of book and author popularity.

I would use the site more if they had a separate section for children's books, though.

An update: It's official. Library Thing is now officially trying to create a new catalog based on tags and is looking for volunteers to head up the endeavor.

Thing 5 - photos

This photo was taken by Darren Hesten and found on the Flickr site in the Creative Commons/Attributions section. I liked it because it is the perfect "apple for the teacher" picture with a twist - the colors seem to be the reverse of the stereotypical red apple. The flickr site looks very useful, especially the creative commons section. I especially like the link to the Creative Commons photos from the Library of Congress which will come in handy when we need to have primary source photos in history, art, science, etc... I can also see accessing the pictures for 5th grade world geography projects, 2nd grade animal reports, signs unit in Kindergarten, really too many places to count. But really interesting to me since we are FINALLY getting class sets of digital cameras and this will help us manage.