Week 7 - Thing 16a and 17

Wow! It is amazing to me how I can spend so much time just clicking and reading and bookmarking sites. I started off this section by going into the Sandbox of the California Curriculum Connections and spent a lot of time reading other people's entries. I got so many ideas from this section and checked out some of the links. I then went to the California Curriculum Connections wiki and checked out a couple of the topics. I first went into the section on Photos and Images and found a new site that allows you to do some great things with photos - dumpr.net. You can actually take a photo and turn it into a sketch along with other ways you can use photos. I bookmarked this site for further "playing." I also visited the voicethread site again because I am very fascinated by this concept. I am trying to see if this is something I could do with elementary students when they work on their biography/autobiography unit. I need to experiment and see how time consuming this is. I then went into the Wiki section and compared two different wiki creation sites. I read about PBwiki and Wikispaces for Educators. I create pathfinders for my elementary students using Microsoft Word and then save it as a web page and load it onto my web page. I read Joyce Valenza's article about the 10 reasons why a wiki is a good tool to use for a pathfinder. I then went and looked at some middle school pathfinders for science and social studies that are done using Wikispaces. I actually registered for an account to Wikispaces and plan to work on switching my pathfinders into wikis this summer. I like how wikispaces has a section for educators that allows ad free pages at no cost. When I was in the sandbox section I also found a pathfinder that was done using a Google custom search. I want to check that out futher, as well.

I did add an entry to the Sandbox portion of the California Curriculum Connections wiki telling how I used the trading cards with my 3rd graders with their state research. I love the trading cards! I will definitely use them again.

I have just added an entry to the PA Curriculum Wiki. I had trouble getting into it because I did not have the password. But thanks to Gabriella, I now have created an entry!