Mr. Mellott’s Weblog

This evening I attended an online discussion on TappedIn.org about web tools that can be used in the classroom. While the discussion itself was disorderly at best the moderator, PamB, did provide some excellent tools for future use. One tool that seemed to grab a great deal of attention was Animoto, a site that takes your pictures and music and turns them into a sharp looking video that would be great to introduce a unit or to reflect back on the class at the end of the year. Students could also create wonderful videos to reflect some learning that they have gathered over the course of a unit. She also introduced us to a newspaper generator, that could be used for a host of applications. JeffC, one of the site administrators, introduced us to www.snurl.com, a URL shortening site that saves your longer URL’s as shorter easy to remember URL’s that you can provide to your students. That could prove very convenient.  As for the discussion itself, I guess the nature of this type of forum is quite disorganized.  The moderator for the discussion did not seem to control the conversation as much as I would like to have seen.  Many individuals apparently did not feel the need to read all that was typed and constantly missed URL’s and instructions.  The discussion could easily have taken 20-30 minutes, but the interruptions and repeated instructions necessitated a full hour’s time slot.  Perhaps I expect too much.