Blog Post #8

This week we were told to explore the web and find our own 21st century tools we could use in our classroom one day. i have found a few that I want to share with you. I want to teach either Kindergarten or first grade so, most of these are for little kids.
First, is this tool know as Voki. Students create their own personalized speaking avatar. They are able to customize their character, design their own background, you even record your own voice so the avatar will talk. Voki avatars help children improve listening and speaking abilities. Teachers are able to make one as well for introductions, activities, and even things to help pronunciation of vocabulary.

Secondly, there is this tool I will definitely be using known as Voicethread. This is a tool to involve technology with storytelling. It allows students to add images, text, audio, and video to create a digital story. Once a child has created their voicethread others can comment either by text, recording, or filming. This tool is great to collaborate with not only other students in their class or school, but all over the world. Students can draw their own pictures and talk about it, or create their own story and record their own voices while telling others about it. This would be a good project for them to do and share with the class.

Lastly, their is this tool called Edmodo. My senior year of high school, my school system started using this in K-12. This is a tool where teachers can post homework assignments, ask questions to their students in their class only, the students can get on and have a conversation with their classmates, and the teacher can have online parent and teacher conference. This is laid out just like facebook. I guess it is sort of like Sakai for all of us here at South. the main reason I would want to use something like this in my classroom, is because students don't always tell their parents the truth if they have homework or not. This way the parents would have access to check to see if their child has homework for that night.