Thing #7: Image Generators

Since I am so visual...I loved checking into these image generators. I had already had experience with Voicethreads and even worked with one of our teachers using it with the vocabulary words in her English classroom. But I had not had experience with the other sites. So I thought I would check out WordSift and Glogster:

First....WordSift. What a gold mine for a teacher when working with students on vocabulary or reading comprehension. But first, let me confess as to my initial reactions to the site. When I first went to the site, I typed in some text, pressed sift....saw the words come up in the cloud and thought to myself "So what?" But then I watched the video tutorial and began to understand all the tools at my fingertips. For a teacher in Science to take a complex portion of text and have the students WordSift it first....the most common 50 words will then appear. The largest will be the most often used and should be the ones the students concentrate on to learn as vocabulary. Then down below the words, there is the option to see images...so unfamiliar terms that the students are going to read, especially the most common, can be seen as images by the students. Doing this activity as a class before the students read the passage would only increase reading comprehension of the text. I could also see students using this own their own....after writing something of their own, they could use this tool to find the most common words they used, even how they used the word in context. This could be an easy way to help illustrate for a student the need for variety in word choice. The possibilities for the use of this tool are many!!

I also checked out...Glogster. So anyone remember carting a poster project to class from home? Maybe with cutouts from magazines, words written with sharpies....hopefully conveying some sort of understanding of say the last book you just read for a book report? Glogster makes the carting of the poster board, the sharpie writing, and the magazine cut outs obsolete! And way more fun! Just checking out this site and watching one of the videos near the bottom left "Literature and Glogster EDU"....gives me reason to see this website as a great tech tool for teachers. Teachers can create a safe, protected virtual classroom where students can create their own glogs as projects/assessments of learning like this students project on Chemical Reactions. Or teachers could create learning tools for classroom instruction like this Alphabet Glog. Or Test Reviews can be created and studied. In English classrooms, Glogs could replace book reports. With a Glog, the book report comes alive and the student is forced to think how to represent the book with sound and images and even video, so much better than a piece of poster board where often times the book is just summarized! Science classrooms, glogs could be used as an introductory tool of some concept, but one the students can continually refer back to instead of a one time lecture by a teacher. I really could go on and on with ideas...but go explore for yourself!!

I can't wait to add both of these sites to my "toolbox of learning" to share with others at my school!