Thing 7-Sharing, collaborating, Pinning

So I admit I am a big old Pinterest Addict.  I can loose myself for hours clicking, pinning, tagging!  I love it.  I have found some excellent pin boards for organizing myself at school, literacy centers, and other fun things.  I especially love the visuals for different recipes.

Google Docs-I have used this for myself in the past, but never have used it to share items.  This past year I co-taught enrichment.  We created our grading rubrics in Google docs and then when assessment time came we could easily work on our student rubrics without actually having to find time to meet.  This worked really well.  It also worked well to distribute our final grading rubric with the two other teachers who also teach this course.

Another plus-- Google Docs is that it is extremely helpful for students who either do not have Microsoft Word (or have a really dated version), or the children who do not own, or consistently forget their flash drive.  I have really been pushing these tools for my middle school students because you only need the web.  We also introduced Prezi this year in our enrichment program.  The students loved that they could work at school or home.


Stixy-I have always wanted to try this but never seemed to find the time.  So I created a Stixy account.  After giving it some thought I decided that this could be a very useful tool to use with students.   Next year I would like to use this not only with my enrichment students, but with my fifth and sixth grade students as well.

With animoto I used dummy email accounts that  I set up through Google.  I plan on assigning each student a dummy email account so they can create a stixy page.  A quick assessment or activity could be to add a note or response on a note and stick it to a shared class board.  Using the mask function on the project you can keep responses hidden until all students are finished.

Additionally, I liked how you can add photos, and documents.  I may try to use these features to have students create a digital portfolio of their work over the course of the year.  I am always looking for tools to help get rid of paper-this may work well for me.

May also be nice to create a collaborative image board for students to share books they have read.  It might make some of the required classroom genre reading that happens within the fourth grade classroom more enticing.