Mutimedia

I am so so so excited about epals.com. Not only can I get a pal for myself, I can get my whole class their own pals. The site also offers blogging and other projects. I looked at the human rights project to see art and poems that kids have created to share. There seems to be mini-lessons but I need some more time to explore. We could create stories and poems and read them and share them using Voice Thread (see below).

Slide.com offered me the chance to make a slide show and it was easy!!! Students would love this. The only disadvantage is that the captions are limited to very few words. I played around at Tarheel Reader and wish I had known about the site last school year. I had a student who could not read in any language and he was already 14. He had many issues, but I think the books there would have been valuable for him.

VoiceThread was a bit more involved, as you can add your own voice to the pages along with captions. I loved the book the ASU students made. I made a shoddy one just to see if I could. This would be excellent for sharing books with ELL kids at the elementary school!! (and anywhere else in the world!!)

I played with CaptionTube but was not able to successfully save/export the captions. I can see more uses with VoiceThread, like reading a poem or a short story. It appears that I need the tutorial videos at CaptionTube. :-)