Time Warp - Posts From January 2010

In an effort to share old blog posts that can get lost by continuing to post new material, I thought it would be a great idea to have a monthly post where I share "A Year Ago This Month."  All of the edubloggers out there share some great stuff, and over time, that great stuff can get lost in more great stuff.  Not only that, you get some new readers who might have missed your blog from "way back when."  Because honestly, how many of us when we visit a blog examine the Previous Post Section...especially from a year ago?

So, what were some of the posts from January of 2010?

1.) The Hero Factory - A great site for students to create a Super Hero!

2.) Awesome Stories - A great resource for hearing stories from people who lived during various times

3.) One Word, So Little Time - An interesting site that provides a word and a text box.  Great for free writing.

4.) The State of the Union Address Comparison - Using Wordle

5.) 10 Twitter Tools -  A list of Twitter companion software that you can use.

6.) Education Humor - A great blog to help lighten the mood.

Do you have a blog with a long history or share tons of resources that might be worth mentioning again?  This might be a great way to share with your readers some of your older blog posts that they might have missed.

Now in 2012, I can just share this post, with posts from January 2011.

Have fun looking back and reflecting!

Biblio Bouts

What an interesting concept.  Biblio Bouts allows students to research sites and compete to have the best set.  Then through various methods those sites are graded, ranked, examined to determine value. The students who have compiled the best research sites win the "bout."  The highest rated resources can then be used for the bibliography for a particular assignment.

In order for Biblio Bouts to work, user must be using Firefox and have the Zotero (A free citation management tool, which you can read a blog post about here) installed on Firefox.  Once that has been done, then users will supply an email, username/alias, and password.  

There are four types of bouts:
1.) Donor - This is a general sharing of a resource/website
2.) Closer - These are what students would consider their BEST resource/website
3.) Tagging and Rating - Here students are rating the quality of their OPPONENTS (Other Students) resources/websites
4.) Best Bibliography - From all the submissions by the students, choose the top ten.

Students win by having the largest number of points taken from all four bouts.

There is a video on the front page of Biblio Bouts that explains a little about the each bout and the process.  What a great way to get students competing for finding the best research!!

PrimaryAccess

A great tool for social studies, PrimaryAccess allows users the ability to take primary documents and create three different presentations.  PrimaryAccess was designed for use in K-12 classrooms to aid in teaching content knowledge, critical thinking skills and even writing or storytelling skills. Teachers can set up and manage class activities and materials with ease.  Here is a description of each presentation tool:

"PrimaryAccess MovieMaker enables you to combine text, audio and images into compelling personal narratives and digital stories, with a simple movie-making process. Steps like scripting, recording and saving are entirely Web-based--no software to install--and the movies are easy to retrieve and share."

 
"PrimaryAccess StoryBoard enables you to create comic strips and slideshows by combining images, thought bubbles, props and actors. All steps are entirely Web-based--no software to install--and the comics are easy to publish and share."

"PrimaryAccess Rebus makes it easy to create a Rebus using primary source documents. A Rebus (Latin for ’by things”) is a written story that uses pictures as parts of the text. PrimaryAccess Rebus encourages students to explore primary sources by creating crops of those sources and using them to tell a story."

All images are made available from the Library of Congress.   You can use any of these presentation tools without an account.  If you want to create activities and manage classes you can use their Teacher Tools page to create a classroom of students, choose and upload images for students to use, browse other creations by teachers and students, and several other features as well.

PrimaryAccess is an initiative at the Center for Technology & Teacher Education in the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia.