A Story Telling Experiment

I wish I could retrace my steps and tell you how I found this wiki but unfortunately at the time I just copied and pasted the link into the post and saved it as a draft. It was probably featured on one of numerous blogs in my Google Reader.

A wiki like Wikipedia is a conglomeration of input from a variety of sources. Some say wikis lacks value as a primary source but I happen to think they contain pockets of information that would take me days or weeks to collect on my own. The CogDogRoo is a gem!

Alan Levine who writes the CogDog Blog must have some time on his hands. Either that or he never sleeps! His wiki contains the results from his grand experiment to test every web 2.0 story making tool he could find. He takes a simple story about Domino the dog and translates it into 50 different formats using only web 2.0 tools. A big THANK YOU to Alan for making this invaluable site accessible to students and teachers.

http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/50+Ways

Mathcasts 500 Project from Math Playground

Tuesday evening with Women of Web 2, yielded the usual rich chat room conversation and engaging speaker content. Colleen King a math teacher/consultant and the host of Math Playground talked about the Mathcast 500 Project. Her tagline rings true for me, “When students become teachers, learning become inevitable.” The Mathcast concept makes full use of Voicethreads technology. User friendly, this web-based teaching tool can turn students into effective peer teachers. This new project promises to become a repository of student created resources. I did some experimenting today and my students seem to be very receptive to recoding their reflections about math activities. I did run into a technical glitch. In some cases the recording cut off after only several seconds so I wasn’t able to complete the project. Here is an example of what some students created to explain how they use Rocket Math. If Voicethreads can be this effective for math, just imagine the numerous other ways it could be used by students to reinforce and extend learning. Colleen’s Math Playground is deep and wide. I plan to return regularly for the latest math tools.