Final Thoughts on TPTE 486

Well, it's been a long, hard ride, but I've enjoyed every bit of it. I was explaining to a friend one day last week what TPTE 486 consisted of, and she said "That's a real class? It sounds like fun!" I would have to agree. This has been one of my favorite classes during my time at UT, and I have learned so much. I didn't realize when I came into this class how computer-illiterate I really was, until I saw what I could do. There are so many tools and resources out there I didn't even know existed, but now I can use them in my own classroom as a teaching tool that hopefully will add a little bit of life to my lessons. I am so excited to get started now!

Digital Story on iMovie

Piknik

Piknik is a photo editing website that requires no software where you can crop, resize, and add neat effects to your photos that you upload. You can add captions, "cartoonize" photos, or select a color scheme. You can add artistic effects, stickers, frames, and even scrapbook. It a neat way to put a unique touch on photos. This might be another neat tool for creative projects in the classroom, for example, making "Hamlet" into a cartoon? Hmm. I may try that.

Glogster

Glogster is a website, sort of like Google Blogs with a twist. A "Glog" is more of a type of poster made up of text, images, music, and video. It can be made unique to your own specifications and are a good way for students to express who they are. This would be a neat opening assignment that I could give my students to get to know them.

Storybird

Storybird is an interactive web tool where you can make your own story. This would be especially good for Elementary level students who are learning how to read, write, and putting stories together. You just create an account and choose your theme. The pictures inspire the story, which could be a plus, but also is quite limiting. Pretty neat!

Smilebox

Smilebox is an online application that lets you create slideshows, invitations, greetings, collages, scrapbooks and photo albums on your computer. You just have to create a free account, upload your pictures or videos, and pick your theme and music. There is all kinds of creative things your students could use this for on projects.

Google Forms

Google Forms is a neat little tool where you can create forms for your students, other teachers, parents, or really anybody to fill out. This would be great for surveys, questionnaires, and even quizzes for your students because it gives you a break down of answers in a chart. This would also be good for pre-tests and post-test to get a grasp on where your students stand before, during, and after units.

Animoto

Animoto is a web application that produces videos or slideshows from uploaded photos, video clips and music by the user. You just have to create an account, one of which is free (but limited), and then you can get started creating a slideshow. Music is one of the main aspects of your video and the slideshow is based around the music that you choose. This would be a great tool to use in the classroom when giving a presentation or putting together a "memoir" of your time together with the students, such as a senior video or fieldtrip slideshow.

Tagxedo

Tagxedo is just like Wordle, only the word clouds are able to take on the shape of any picture you upload. For example, you could copy and paste the University of Tennessee's Alma mater and upload a photo of a power T and it will take the words in a word cloud in the shape of a power T. Really cool!

Wordle

Wordle is a neat little website where you can for generate "word clouds" from text that you input. You can personalize your clouds with choose several different fonts, layouts, and color schemes to make your word cloud more unique and the more often a word appears in the text box, the larger the word appears in the word cloud. After you create your Wordle, you can print the image out or save them to a gallery to share with others, but I could not figure out how to save the image, if I were to want to put it into a document or save it onto my desktop. I think this would be a neat tool as far as making a project more aesthetically pleasing, adding some creativity to an assignment, or simply for fun, but did not see very much use in it as far as academics.

Delicious

I had never heard about anything like Delicious until this class, and I must admit, it took me a while to figure out exactly what it was, and even longer to figure out how to use it. The way I understand it is that it is a "social book marking web service" for storing, sharing, and discovering websites, pages, and links. Users are able to post cool websites, pages, and links that they discover on the web and share them with their "friends" or "followers," if you will. It has a "hotlist" on its home page and "popular" and "recent" pages, which help to make the website track trends throughout the site and web. This could be a cool website to use in the classroom if you need to share links and useful websites and sources, but it might be time consuming for the students to learn how to use it.

Twitter

I have had a Twitter for about a year now, and am finally getting the hang of it. I love it! Twitter is a social networking website that allows its users to send and read messages called "tweets," which are posts of up to (only!) 140 characters displayed on the your page. All you do is go to Twitter.com and set up a free account. You can work on your "bio," and then search for friends, interests, celebrities, and even news and sports websites. Now your ready to tweet. I see this as a sort of "microblog," or a Facebook with only status updates, tagging, and friending. I think this might be a good tool to use in the classroom for things like classroom projects, or even a way to communicate with your students, much like we did in 486.

Sentence Structure Concept Map from Inspiration

I really loved this application! It was fairly easy to use and had some great tools to use when making your concept map. I think this application would be very useful in any classroom, English to Science, and would really help the students to organize their knowledge or plan projects.