I liked seeing more of the tools that are out there, and I bookmarked a whole bunch of them and dabbled with them briefly. But I gotta use the word "overwhelming" again. There's just so much, and even with the tools I liked and bookmarked, I wonder if I'll ever find the time to learn how to use them. It doesn't help, of course, that my frustration threshold for such things is so incredibly low. If the instructions don't make sense, if it won't let me do things the way I'd like, I tend to lose patience fast, and I avoid trying for a long time because I'm just not prepared to go there. But anyway, some possibly useful stuff from the "discovery list"........
As any of my history students could have predicted, I was most interested in TimeGlider, the tool that lets you make online timelines. I've played with it a bit and there are several things I like about it -- especially the fact that you can use a broader view but then zoom in gradually to reveal more specific people and events, which then fade out again as you zoom back out. Seems like it will be difficult on a computer screen to display the really broad view that I often prefer, but for focusing in on, say, a century at a time, it could be great. I could see using it as a basic online framework for an entire course, or having kids each study a century or decade and create a timeline of their own. But I've barely scratched the surface of how the thing actually works. I just don't have time (no pun intended) to mess around with it. Also, it's still a "beta" version (which I take to mean that it's still in development), which makes me a little reluctant to put lots of effort into creating some timeline, only to have it disappear or become obsolete as they improve the program. But this will definitely be high on my list of things to play around with this summer, for possible use in the fall.
There were some other things on the list that seemed cool and that seemed, vaguely, like they could be useful in the classroom, but I'm not quite sure how yet. LetterPop, for example, looks like it makes really nice newsletters pretty easily, and maybe that's something we could find a use for..... for a junior high paper, perhaps? MixBook looked nice also, and I thought maybe we could use it to create a sort of home-made class yearbook next year (which we could maybe sell as an auction fundraiser??). I'm especially interested in that because I just got the first decent camera that I've had in decades, and I'm eager to put it to use.
And then there were some sites that sounded interesting but didn't impress me. I was intrigued by Sketchcast, though not quite sure how I'd use it in the class. But when I went to the site I couldn't get any sound to play in the samples. I know they don't always have sound, but some of the ones I tried (including the "Introduction to Sketchcast") were clearly supposed to. Couldn't hear a thing, though -- and no, I didn't have my computer sound muted. So that didn't exactly inspire confidence. And I was interested in the United Streaming thing, which looks like just part of the Discovery Channel website, but I found their webpage pretty much incomprehensible. It's very difficult to see how one is supposed to use it. I think I'll stick to Teacher Tube for that sort of stuff.
As for tools I found on my own, I had the best luck using the first recommended site, seomoz.org. I liked that they showed the top three award-winning sites in various categories. The most intriguing categories for me were genealogy and mapping applications, both of which I could see having kids use for individual social studies projects. I bookmarked MyHeritage.com and Geni.com for the genealogy stuff and played with them a bit. They both let you set up a family tree, which other family members can add info to, and they give you all sorts of tools for doing genealogy research. Can't quite tell which one is better. (That seems to be true of many of these tools -- there are several that do the same basic thing, so in addition to learning to use any one of them, there's the added confusion of wondering whether it's even the best one to be learning. So what do you do -- spend hours learning each one and then choose??) As for the mapping applications, the first place winner (Frappr) won't open for some reason, but I bookmarked the other two -- Wayfarer and CommunityWalk and have dabbled a bit with the latter. I like the idea of these too -- that you can make your own maps by manipulating the ones available online. Obviously something that could be fun to have kids play around with. The other site for tools, go2web20, was just completely mind-boggling. Way too much stuff, and though there are brief descriptions that appear with each logo, it's hard to tell from many of them what the tool actually does. And a lot of them seem to be related to (shudder) Twitter, which I hate with a passion.
Anyway, of the tools I did find, I hope to spend more time with all of them this summer. It might be better, though, to concentrate on learning and implementing just one. That would probably be TimeGlider -- but only if it's not too risky to start creating things with their "beta" version. I need to find out more about that.
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