Three Cool Tools

photo © 2006 Esther Gibbons more info (via: Wylio)


I spent some time catching up on reading blogs and tweets and found three tools that I wanted to play with (with the cooperation of my two year old who took a nap). I saw Wylio first on Free Tech 4 Teachers blog and several times on Twitter. Decided to use it on this post first. Very easy to use. Curious to see if it is blocked at school tomorrow. If it isn't (fingers crossed) I will definitely share this with my students. Usually their idea of citing an image from the web is "Thanks to Google Images". I keep fighting that battle when I am able to spend time with them on citation before projects. I will continue to fight and hope that this site is another weapon to combat the problem.
The next two tools are Voki and ipadio. I have been on Voki before, according to the site 2007. I know that I didn't pursue using it further because it is blocked at school. Now that I have a blog I am able to use it here. I used it to create a short welcome message, especially considering that I might get a few more visits from the Edublog nomination. That would be cool, anyway. My interest in Voki was rekindled with a recent post on The Innovative Educator blog. I plan to petition that the site be unblocked at school. I know our students would love using it for projects and I think it is an awesome idea to use for sub plans. Ipadio is the second tool from the Innovative Educator post that I played with today. It was really easy to set up. My only issue was that I was unsure about using a country code so I put my number in once with and once without. Apparently you do not need the country code before your US number. I set up the phlogs to automatically post to my school Facebook fan page and my Twitter account. I created a reminder for students about our Book Swap this week on ipadio. It worked wonderfully. Can't wait to use this with my students. After this great experience using it I decided to add the Ipadio app to the iPods we just purchased.
I have also added a few more apps since my post yesterday: iChoose, Doodle Buddy, Comic Lite, Storyrobe, Idea Sketch, Flip Book Lite and Easy Chart. Excited to present the iPods to the teachers tomorrow and begin using them.
Thanks to the Innovative Educator, Lisa Nielsen, for more excellent, easy to use tools for educators.