If your presentation is complete and you know you don’t need to do any further tweaking, upload it to Slideshare.net.  After it has been uploaded, you can edit the privacy settings and share it with specific people or make it public. You can even copy the embed code and make it viewable within your own web page or blog. You can also give others the option to download the presentation as a PowerPoint file to their own computer.

Here is a presentation within SlideShare on creating effective presentations:

If you want to continue working on your presentation, or if several people are collaborating on the same presentation, consider uploading it to Google Docs. Set your sharing preferences as desired. You may even want to start from scratch on Google Docs and bypass PowerPoint altogether. There are a few built-in themes, or you can upload your own background.

Howie DiBlasi shared numerous online tools during his NCTIES session. His website contains additional links, handouts, and powerpoints that I hope to find time to explore in the not too distant future.

He began by showing a revision of Karl Fisch’s Did You Know video.

Following a brief discussion about how students today are living in a digital world, he shared the following Web 2.0 resources:

Wikipedia

• probably not completely up-to-date
• only one source – students should use additional sources for information
• suggests that students find out something in their community that is not already written up and post and article about it

After asking how many people were using blogs, wikis, and VoiceThreads, he noted that these tools are being used much more often now than a year ago. (See previous posts about blogs, wikis, and VoiceThreads.)

Ning.com

• create your own network and decide who you invite
• similar to a social network but used for professional reasons
• very useful for administrators
  • should create ning for their school
  • use as communication device
  • put all teachers in it
  • upload docs, videos, collaboration group
• need to unblock
• then could open up to community and let parents communicate within the site

Imbee

• a social network for kids
• monitored by adults
• designed as home or school site

Utterli

• crossposts to several networking sites at once
• send videos, messages, and texts from mobile phone

Twitter

• teachers could use to post homework assignments every day
• parents can follow and get news and homework daily
• instant communication

Gizmos

• interactive flash utilities for math and science

Delicious

• keep students materials and sites organized by tags
• use as network for older kids to share links

Fantastic Contraption

• online physics game

GCast

• create a podcast using your cell phone
• use Audacity to change pitch to make it sound like you’re having a conversation with a different person

ePals and Gaggle

• free email
• 191 countries and over 11 million students
• walled garden (safe for students)
• emails are all monitored
• projects are already set up, like people and culture, global warning, habitats, etc.

Jing

• free screen capture
• screencasting tool
• make instructional videos

280 Slides

• like powerpoint
• can upload powerpoints and save back to computer
• web2.0 based

Animoto

• make cool videos with music from photographs
• see example here

My Studyo

• make quizzes online
• can embed into web site

Glogster

• create interactive online posters
• make sure you use ed version

Rock You

• fun effects for use with photos
• add music, text, glitter and more to slideshow

PhotoShow

• another online slideshow for photos
• numerous music choices to add to photo show
• done by Roxio
• will be creating an ed version

One True Media

• combine photos and videos
• add special effects

EduBlogs TV

• safe place to upload videos for kids

Ustream

• record video of presentations
• live stream so others can watch in real time

QuantumShift tv

• can upload videos
• stories about people who are changing the world

YackPack

• connect members of group
• live talk
• messags

Flowgram

• combine powerpoints, web pages, documents
• add your voice to presentation
• share with friends

Pixton

• create your own comics
• special are for schools
• have to pay for the education part

You can download the entire PowerPoint from Howie DiBlasi’s web site if you’d like to see even more!

More NCTIES Posts:

Opening Keynote
Photography Problems
Digital Tools for Digital Kids
Assessment with Technology
SmartBoard in Upper Elementary
Skype in the Classroom
More Than YouTube
Closing Keynote

Once you have an account, simply upload pictures from your computer, select music from their library or upload your own, and wait for the magic to occur. They say that every video is different, so if you don’t like the way yours turns out, simply try again. This is such a fun site! Once you create a video, you can copy the embed code (I’ll show you how!) and then place the video on your own class web site to share with your students and their families.

Here’s an example of a video I just created from some pictures I had of South Salem’s 2008 beach party.

Our school division superintendant, Dr. Alan Seibert, will soon join a group of educators who will be traveling through India and visiting schools there. Earlier this fall, he asked teachers who might be interested in doing some collaborative projects to contact him, and Tina Coffey and I then met with him to discuss ways we could facilitate those projects using technology. Thus, Trek 2 India was born!

We created this wiki to help teachers and students follow along with Dr. Seibert on his journey as well as to provide a place for him to share his pictures, videos, and stories. But, as usual we had an ulterior motive! We wanted this to be an example of a way you could incorporate wikis into your curriculum.

What is a wiki? Well, wiki is a Hawaiian word for quick or fast, so a wiki is a quick (and easy) way to create a web page. It can be edited from any computer with an internet connection, and once people join, they can edit the wiki, thus making it a true collaborative project.

Two of the most widely used wikis in education are wikispaces and pbwiki. Students can use wikis for collaborative projects on any unit in social studies or science, or to share reflections on books, or favorite authors….and the cool thing is, those projects will remain on the web for the students to use for review when testing time rolls around in the spring!

You can create simple wikis with just text and links, and that would be awesome! Also, if you take a look around the Trek 2 India wiki, you’ll notice that we also used several “embedded” objects. That means that these objects are actually stored on other web sites and are pulled in when you click on the page. (It’s easy to do! Just ask!)

You might be interested in using some of these yourself! Check out these sites that we used:

• Glogster (poster site – home page)
• VoiceThreads
• Google Maps
• Flickr
• Weather Underground
• Wikipedia (several images from here)
• ClockLink
• Dumpr (fun image editing site)

You can also upload pictures, videos, and podcasts directly into your wikispaces site. If you do set up a wiki for your class, be sure to take advantage of the ad free sites being offered to educators by wikispaces.

Here’s an example I created by entering my blog address:

The larger the word, the more times it was found in the text. So, I can quickly see that I’ve used the terms “teachers” and “training” quite a bit, which did not surprise me. However, the words “new” and “year” appeared frequently also, and I’m not sure why I’ve used those so often.

This might be a helpful visual when teaching about the overuse of common words in student writing. Either type in or paste in some text from student projects and let the students analyze the results.

You can also enter the username for anyone who uses Delicious for bookmarking and see what tags they are using. Here’s mine:

It’s simple to see that I have lots of sites tagged with Web 2.0! Enter anyone’s Delicious username and quickly see if they’re interested in sites that you might also be interested in exploring.

One final example: Use this cool tool to create colorful word clouds of student names at the beginning of the year. You can also designate that the words be displayed in “almost” alphabetical order. I created the following cloud using first names of the classroom teachers at my schools.

Classroom uses:

• Visualize overuse of common words in student writing
• Enter vocabulary words and let students practice reading them.
• Enter a passage from a story and see how often particular words are actually used.
• Enter text from a historical document and analyze the results.
• For younger students, use this to practice typing in spelling words. They don’t need an account to use the site, and they’ll love playing around with the results!

Update (8/22) Tina Coffey has a post with several terrific examples for using Wordle in the elementary classroom. Be sure to check it out!

What other ways can you think of for using Wordle in the K-5 setting?

Have you ever considered using the internet to extend your learning, not just by researching but by contact with other professionals? There are currently two very popular sites being used by technology educators, librarians, and numerous classroom teachers to create Personal Learning Networks. Each site restricts a post to 140 characters. Each site allows you to choose who you follow so you can build a network of people with similar interests to yours. Each site allows you to search for specific people or for general terms such as “teacher” so you can read posts of interest to you.

The most well known of the two sites is Twitter. You may have heard of it asking “What are you doing?” and people type in frivolous items such as “I’m eating a bologna sandwich.” However, the educational community has transformed it into something completely different. They ask for and share ideas, suggestions, and comments. I’ve been amazed at how many new web tools I have been introduced to by people that I follow on Twitter. It’s rare that I’ve asked a question that has not been answered within just a few minutes.

The second site is Plurk. This is quite similar to Twitter, but the topics become more conversational. Where Twitter tends to offer somewhat random comments, Plurk allows users to respond to questions and comments within a conversation and see other responses as well. It takes a bit more time to get used to the format, but I find that I prefer the threaded conversations in Plurk.

Feel free to follow me in either program. I’m elemtech on both. (Tina Coffey is elemitrt. Check her out while you’re there!) You can also see who we follow (mostly ed tech folks) and choose to follow them out also.

Let me know if you need help learning to navigate these cool new tools! It’s amazing to establish a network of educators from all over the world.

Here’s a example of a voicethread we did with Melanie Smith’s first grades at West Salem after they created their own robots and wrote stories about them:

To set up your own account, go to voicethread.com and register for a new account. Then click on the Go Pro button, then click the K-12 Educators click here link. Complete the form and be sure to use your school email address so you can get a *free* Pro account.

After you have activated your account, let me know and I’ll help you get started with your first voicethread. I like to set the “Share” settings as public with comments, comment moderation ON, and Listed on Browse NO. This way, I can embed the voicethread on a blog or website, I can send the link to someone, but it will not be visible to someone just browsing through the site.

How can you use this great tool? How about book reviews, field trip pictures, digital stories, or even SOL reviews? Here are a few links to help give your more ideas:

VoiceThreads in the Classroom

VoiceThreads Examples

Second Grade Book Reviews (great project for any grade!)

Create Your Own Ending Story

If you have ever experienced the frustration of having a great website bookmarked under your favorites on one computer but needing to locate that same site from a different computer, then you need to explore Delicious. This has become my one “cannot do without” website! Here’s short video that explains how it works:

Once you have your account set up, you can copy any URL, go back to your delicious account, and click on the Post link at the top of the page to bookmark the site. However, it’s much quicker to install and use the web buttons that will live at the top of your browser on computers that you frequently use. You will be prompted to install the buttons when you set up your account.

Like many web 2.0 sites, Delicious uses tags, which are simple ways to organize your bookmarks so you can search for them later on. When you first add a site, you will see the option to add tags before saving. Go ahead and add as many as you want. That way you can search for 3rdGrade or science or education or games…all for the same site. This is a huge difference between Delicious and PortaPortal, which only allows you to add a site to one category at a time.

The other really cool feature of Delicious is the ability to add people to your network so you can easily see what sites they have bookmarked. You can also save bookmarks for other people in your network by tagging them for:name. You can see who has saved the same sites as you by clicking on the “saved by (number) other people” link, and this may lead you to even more useful sites on the same subject.

If you don’t already have a Delicious account, I highly recommend that you set one up and start using it. If you do already have one, install the buttons for Internet Explorer or Firefox and get in the habit of using them.

You can download a handout for Delicious here. If you would just like to explore the site for a bit before setting up an account, go to my account or Tina’s account to find sites that are relevant to elementary education.

Why not have your students create “Did you know?” podcasts using facts from any of their SOL related units? Mr. Barbour had his third graders record several factual podcasts from their SOL units. For an example of this, click below to listen to Mr. Barbour’s third graders as they share facts they learned about Ancient Rome.

Ancient Rome Facts

Mrs. Routt’s third graders enjoy creating their own newscasts at the end of each school year in which they review almost everything they have covered during the year. When students have the opportunity to listen to themselves or to their classmates, they are more eager to listen to the podcasts as they review for their SOL tests.

Third Grade SOL Review

Podcasting is also an excellent way for students to share their original stories and poems. Mrs. Buchholz had her third graders write stories about the adventures of their class pet who escaped.

Oreo’s Big Day Out

It’s great to use readers theaters for podcasts as it helps students who may have difficulty with oral reading skills and fluency. The more fluent readers can practice speaking with expression and using creative voices. Mrs. Bowles had her fourth graders read several tall tales, and the children appeared to really enjoy using the imaginary voices of their characters.

Pecos Bill

Here are a few more ideas for podcasts that you might want to consider for your own students:

1. Interviews – Have students write questions and interview another person in the school, either adults or other students. You could also use interviews to have students answer questions as if they are a famous American or a character from a favorite story.
2. Announcements – Let students practice their broadcast skills as they present announcements for your class, your grade level, or for the entire school. Here is an example: Announcements
3. Riddles – Have students create “Who am I?” or “What am I?” riddles to review people from social studies units, book characters, famous places, or vocabulary words.
4. Songs – Make up new lyrics to familiar melodies, such as multiplication facts.
5. Book Commercials – Instead of written book reports, why not let students talk about their favorite books? Have them share a little about the book and why they recommend it.
6. For the Little Ones – Let them talk about something special in their classroom or something new that they have learned if they’re too young to read or to write their script.

So, give some thought into creating your own podcast this year, and let me know when you’re ready to record! To listen to more podcasts from your school, click on one of the following links:

South Salem Podcasts

West Salem Podcasts