This podcast by Kelly Hines highlighted some of the web 2.0 tools that are available for use with elementary age students - MY little peeps! I'm happy to say that, after participating in this class, I'm already familiar with some of the tools, but others were new to me and I've already played around with some of them.
One such new-to-me tool was Wallwisher.com. I particularly liked the element of sorting kids' sticky notes in various ways to show common thinking or simply as a means of data representation. That was a nice cross-curriculum feature that reinforces what kids are learning in science and math.
Though I was already familiar with Wordle, Kelly Hines' additional suggestions for use were wonderful. Though I've had students generate Wordles, I've not used previously constructed Wordles to elicit student predictions or foster deductive reasoning. I can see copying the text from classroom books or from student writing and generating a Wordle from it, then having the students see if they can figure out the main idea of the piece.
The comic creators mentioned , like Comics.com, were entirely new to me. Though I've not yet had a chance to noodle around on those sites, I'm looking forward to doing so and already see possible applications for my first graders with sequencing. The idea of playing around with cartoons is inherently attractive to the elementary school child and it's wonderful to be able to slip in learning when they don't even realize you're doing it!
For my students, Edmodo looks interesting for the survey-building capabilities. Young children love to "vote" on things and then see that data displayed graphically. Again, I'm looking forward to poking around more on this site, learning the tool, and bringing it to my teaching.
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