Previous Trips into 2.0

Even though the beginnings of my blog may indicate that I'm a complete newbie to Web 2.0 I have taken a few day trips into this world.


Last year I worked on a few projects utilizing Web 2.0 tools with my students.  Some particularly entertaining pieces of student work came out of a project I did using a website called Blabberize.  As part of an author study on the poet Shel Silverstein my students chose a poem to practice reading with fluency and expression.  After some practice I recorded students reading their poem and used my document camera to capture a digital image of an illustration they had drawn to compliment their poem. I put these files in a folder for them and we headed to the computer lab to create the magic you see below.  We were all very pleased with the end result and the process once we got to the computer lab was easy!  The kids were hooked and went home to create more "blabbers" of their own.


What you can learn from my mistakes if you want to try this project in your classroom:

• You can only upload a 30 second sound clip to Blabberize.  I learned this the hard way and had to have some students select a shorter poem and rerecord it. 
• There has to be an easier way of getting their illustrations into jpeg files.  I took a picture with my document camera, transferred the image into PowerPoint  and then converted each slide to a jpeg. Very time-consuming!
• Apparently there is a microphone function on the site, but I couldn't get that going.
• I didn't want to have them all create their own accounts for the site so I had them all log in to my account.  This made things easy because then all their blabbers ended up in my account and I could easily view them all and link them to our classroom wiki.  I had confidence that the students would not sabotage each other's work in the lab and I changed my password right after our computer lab time to cut off access.

Below are some glogs I created about the process with some work samples.