I had a lot of fun playing around with Google Drawings. At first I went through a couple of the examples and tried my hand and creating a planet of my own after watching an instructional video. Afterwards I played around a little bit and tried looking at ways I could use this in my classroom. I found that this tool would be an excellent beginning of the year activity for students to introduce themselves. The ability to search the web for countless images to add to you drawing would be great for an electronic collage. I especially liked the transparency features that allow you to drag and place items over a background. It made the drawing more crisp and professional looking.
Twitter is the one form of social media that I never quite took the time to understand. Now that I have had some direction and time to explore, I am impressed with the amount of information available. Users add hashtags that organize their tweets into topics. A simple search offers several different resources from all kinds of individuals. When searching #tlchat and #edchat I found several different lesson ideas, available resources and interesting topics surrounding education. While I'm not sure I found anything I could use directly in my classroom, I'm sure with some more time to explore I'd come across several pertinent materials. I personally do not have a Twitter; however, I could definitely see myself getting one sometime soon. I think Twitter would be a cool medium to connect with students and families to communicate assignments, announcements and different school functions going on. I think our current forms of communication are dated. People do not always want ...
Fun idea to use it as a 'getting to know you' activity.
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