Hot Potatoes

Hot Potato, Hot Potato!!! Hot Potato, Hot Potato!!! Hot Potato, Hot Potato, Hot Potato, Hot Potato, Hot Potato!!!

Hot Potatoes is an online tool that teachers can use to help with assessments and record keeping. Hot potatoes helps teachers to create a range of different assessments in different formats, ranging from multiple choice to click and drag. Within these assessments, you can also include pictures and music as well. At the moment, only the demo version is available to the public which only lasts for 7 days. A licensed version will not be available until 2 more years... so until then.. it will not a practical tool to rely on.

Click here for some examples of how Hotpotatoes is used:
http://marshalladulteducation.org/student_lessons1.htm

GameMaker

Today, we use the program called Game Maker 7. Game Maker can be used to create games that you see in the arcades even famous games like Pac-Man. Making a game on Game Maker is very time , but hopefully will be easier and faster to use as you get used to it. Today, I made a simple replica of an example game. It was hard and confusing, even frustrating at times, to make the game perform the way you want it to. There is a very slight probability that i will use this program in the classroom, unless if the children are very interested in programming.

Glogster

Today, we went on Glogster. Glogster is a fun and exciting way of engaging students into any learning area by producing posters that reflect on their theme/topic that they are studying and allow the teacher to know what the student has learnt. Glogster can be used in a lot of ways, even for scrapbooking. I would definitely consider using Glogster in my classroom to create a poster. This is what i have done with Glogster...

Twitter

Twitter is an online texting account which you can post up what you want to say. Some celebrities use it to update everyone else about what they are doing, magazines update people about the celebrity world and fitness coaches give others a source of information and advice. Twitter has also been used by schools as well. Schools are using them to update parents about the events that are happening in the school or in the classroom. Twitter can also be used to form discussions about a topic or brainstorming together as a class.

Here is my twitter webpage: http://twitter.com/bitznpiecez

Scratch | Project | Addition

Today we tried out Scratch. Scratch is a program that help to create animations, quizes and projects. This program helps teachers to create a more interesting view of learning all different learning areas of the curriculum. I personally think Scratch is a really good program, but will take alot of time to play around with in order to fully understand and get used to making small animations for the classroom.

Here's an example of what i did with Scratch:

Click here

JING!!!

Jing is a program that can be used to capture both images and videos. This is similar to your print screen function but with the option to capture videos as well. Once the image or video has been captured, the image or videos can be edited with the use of arrows, textboxes, highlight and colour. when finished, the image can be saved on the compmuter or even posted onto the internet.
Activities that can be used with this program is editing paragraphs and capturing videos to personalise assignments.
I personally do not feel that Jing will be that useful in the classroom, but may occassionally use it to capture videos and other kinds of images.
Here are some examples:

Google Docs

Today, we took a look at Google Docs, tried it out and even made some documents...

Click here to see the story we made as a class.

Google Docs is like any other word processing program but without the need to license or install anything. It avoids the typical duplicate copies of a single document when it gets moved around and shared around. When using Google Docs, the one document can be edited by a number of people and is updated almost instantly (every minute or when the save button is clicked). It can be used in the classroom when creating a class story, or doing sequencing activities. It is definitely be a tool that i will use in the future.