In this post I will be exploring
three new Web 2.0 sites that can be used for educational purposes. None of these sites were truly designed with
education in mind, but a number of fun assignments can be developed off of them
and applied to a wide variety of classrooms.
Instead of reviewing three sites that are fairly similar, I purposefully
have chosen three sites that allow for dynamic presentation in three unique
ways. Each site I will also review using
the five criteria for evaluating website for educational purposes as discussed
by Steve Dembo and Adam Bellow in their book, Untangling the Web.
Throughout this post I will provide some ideas for classroom application
and I would love to hear about how you have adapted these or other sites for
use inside your own classroom. Please
post a comment below to share your ideas.
The first site I am going to review
is pixton.com, which is a website that
allows you to create comics online.
There is the option of having a teacher account that is private and safe
from inappropriate comics that other users have created. However, this option costs you $8.99 a month
and allows up to 200 students to sign up.
As I am just reviewing this website I choose the free option which
provides you some of the features available on the site. The biggest downfall to the free option is
the fact that you cannot upload your own photos to the site. One of the reasons that I choose this site
over other similar sites was because of the ability to upload your own photos
and then put animation bubbles over those images to tell the story. A few other problems that I ran into, was
with the free account there are only a limited number of characters that you
can choose from. While you can pose and
change the faces of these characters, the ability to change their clothes is
not possible. So while I choose to make
a comic set during WW2, I could not find any characters that were in uniform to
use. On the positive side, the site is
very easy to use and create comics that look professional with little effort. As for the educational possibilities there
are a number of ways in which this type of resource could be used in the
classroom. You could have the students
be a person involved in a historical situation and tell a story from a first
person perspective. (See my
example) Another option could be to have
the students create a situation and then address the problem in their comic,
for example immigration or Westward expansion.
As for the evaluation of this website, by paying to use the teacher
service all the criteria are met.
However, the free option does expose students to randomly chosen
creations for students to view. While
the site does employ language filters, that is no guarantee. Overall the website could offer some valuable
activities and learning for the students, especially if you are willing to pay
for the added security.
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| Created using Pixton |
The second website that I will be
reviewing is easel.ly which is a web based
platform that allows you to create online visuals, posters, that can then be
shared or embedded across all digital platforms. As with pixton, this site has a free option
and pro option that provides the user with more graphic choices from which to
create your visual from. The site
provides a number of premade examples that you can edit and change to fit your
specific needs. These are even
categorized, so you can search for ones that only deal with history or
technology, to just name a few. This was
all very easy to navigate and intuitive.
However, when you get to the actual creating of your visual things are
much more difficult as any keyboard shortcuts you might want to use no longer
work. The biggest issue I had was trying
to delete items off of the example I choose.
You must use their icons on their tool bars to do any adding or
subtracting to your creation. I also
found it very difficult to move items around on the page once I had created
them. Often times I would grab the
object to move it, only to discover that I was just resizing the object and I
would then have to go back and fix everything.
Eventually, I got the hang of things but there is definitely a learning
curve associated with the site. As for
educational benefits, the site does allow you to create very visually pleasing
posters that are easy to use on digital platforms, but I believe there are
better programs out there for this. Even
using Microsoft publisher will give to the same capabilities, minus the ability
to embed the object that this program does.
If the site improved the creation process by allowing keyboard shortcuts
like deleting and copy pasting, this site would be a real treasure for most
teachers. I emailed the creators of the
site my suggestions and I will update this post if I hear back from them. My evaluation of the website does raise a few
flags to be aware of, the examples are randomly generated, while I did not see
anything objectionable, that does not mean there is something out there. There was also no way to set up a class to
have everything grouped together, in order to see the students work they would
have to send it or post it for you to view.
Overall this site has promise to be a real benefit to educators, but it
is just missing a few finer touches that would make it perfectly suited for
schools.
 |
| Created using easel.ly |
The final site I reviewed is ujam, an online music creator that allows you
to mix, record and arrange music without having to have an entire recording
studio. This site allows the user to
sing their own music and arrange it how they would like or remix other songs. Just so you know, the prospect of singing
for other people to hear is absolutely terrifying to me, so with that in mind I
recruited my son to read a poem and then I put it together with his help. The result that you can hear took us less
than an hour to complete and I think sounds surprisingly well done, considering
neither of us really knew what we were doing as we started this process. Example Song The difficulties that we faced was really
with the fact that it was difficult to edit the song and align the different
parts, chorus and versus with what was actually done by my son. As for adding background music and changing
his voice that was done really easily by simply dragging the effect you want
down onto the active bar. If you are a
music teacher this site could be invaluable to you to have the students record
themselves singing or playing and then creating songs to accompany their
performances. As a history teacher, you
could have the students create their own songs about a historical topic or
theme that is being discussed in class.
For English teachers, maybe creating a playlist of music that a
character in the book would be listening to as they progress throughout the
novel would allow you to assess the students understanding of the complexity of
the character. You could create any type
of assignment using this site and easily tailor it to fit a wide variety of
different levels and subjects. As for
the evaluation of the website, this site is free to use but does not offer an
educational space. Those examples that
are present on the main page have been reviewed by the curators of the site and
were appropriate for anyone to listen to.
As for publishing your work, you have the option of downloading an MP3
version of your song or linking from their site to a third party site like a
blog or website. Overall this site could
be very valuable to educators in a wide variety of different disciplines.
Throughout this process I found a
number of valuable resources that could supplement the amazing teaching that
goes on throughout America every day. By
using these and other sites, hopefully you will be able to truly assess the
learning that is occurring inside your classrooms. In today’s digital world you are really only
limited by the creativeness of your own mind, and hopefully after reading these
website reviews you are able to be inspired and change the future of your
students.
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