A great way to create online Photo Books is through Picaboo. It is a software that requires you to download it, but it offers a great way to create photo album on your computer with a lot of great features. There are tons of tools for your photo book that allow you to customize how it looks. You can add backgrounds, custom layouts, text boxes so you can label your photos. You can also organize your photos to create a story flow so that your pictures go in sequential order. There are also several other tools that could be used for a personal or school projects.
You could easily have your students use Picaboo to do a biography project in your class over an author, scientist, historical figure, etc. Would be a great way to present information to the class, especially with the ability to add text and put in sequential order. I suggest that you download and try it out yourself to see if there can be an educational application in your classroom.
Preceden is a simple timeline creation tool. It is free to use. It would be ideal if you wanted to do the events from a major world war because it would be easy to track different battles. It would be great in WWII because you could show all the different campaigns on one timeline because of how they are color coded. It is really difficult for students to understand that multiple events happen in history at the same time and textbooks do a horrible job of conveying this a lot of the time. Preceden would be a great way to follow events.
On a completed timeline a description of the events is listed below the actual timeline. Each of those events has a "go to" link that will take you to it on the timeline. You can also print the descriptions of each event allowing a student to turn in a paper if need be. You can see a sample of a timeline here. It is the timeline of Preceden.
Headmagnet is a Flashcard creation tool unlike any others you will see. I could give a description and tell you about it, but there is no reason to reinvent the wheel. Richard Byrne of Free Technology 4 Teachers does a great job of explaining what this site can do as well as providing a video. I highly suggest that you subscribe to his blog if you have not already.
KeepVid allows you to take the streaming video from sites like YouTube and download them. This works great because you can download the files as a Flash file and then easily upload them to a site like Prezi. You can add a Toolbar link so that when watching the video, it will start to download. It is a great feature to use in schools because of all the other problems with YouTube. It would be a way to keep those videos you love and show in class without all the distractions that come from YouTube.
Thank you for sharing some Web 2 tools that I did not know about.
ReplyDeletePicaboo is new to me, it looks fantastic, I can't wait to download and play with it. I usually stick to iPhoto with the students because it does so much, but I really like some of the features in Picaboo that are absent in iPhoto. Thanks for posting!
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for sharing! Picaboo looks like a great tool to use. I am curious to see everything the site has to offer. I wonder if it can be used for summaries! The other site that stood out to me was the Preceden site. We are working on timelines this year and I think it would be a great tool to use with my students. It sure beats the old sentence strip timeline!
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