Shaping your words

It seems like every day there's a new web 2.0 site that has a million educational applications. Okay, maybe not a million, and there are certainly some sites that are just plain silly, but I found one this morning and thought immediately of all those 6th grade poetry notebooks out there. We used to do shape poems where the kids had to write their poems in the shape of the subject of the poem. For example, a poem about ghosts would be in the shape of a ghost. You get the idea.

This morning, I found a site that will make shapes out of your text. It's called Festisite and it has just a few limited shapes, but they are fun. Just in time for Valentine's day, you can create a Valentine like this:

How much fun can your students have?

Getting Ready For Camp Wannabeateki

I've been struggling for several weeks now to organize the activities for Camp Wannabeateki. In the past, Camp has been taught from a static web page, and I never thought it had much pizzaz. After listening to a couple of podcasts lately, one by David Warlick about how a science high school in Philadelphia uses Web2 technology, and another one from Teachers Teaching Teachers, I realized what the problem is: There's so much happening in Web2 that every time I start to think about Camp, I find something new. Good Grief!

So, here's what I learned about today: Gabcast and VoiceThread. Gabcast is a service that allows you to record your phone calls. Okay, that sounds really creepy, when in fact, it's a tool that could be used for recording interviews, random musings, or a podcast about some really interesting place you're visiting. It's super easy to use: you call Gabcast, enter your channel number and your password and start talking. You can download the sound files into Audacity for editing, or publish on the fly. VoiceThread allows you to upload video, images or artwork, and then you can record your thoughts, a story, music, whatever sound you want to be a part of your VoiceThread story. As a sample, I added comments to this VoiceThread I found on the Classroom 2.0 Ning. You can use your Gabcast recording for your VoiceThread story! So easy and so amazing. I think the kids are going to be really excited about both of these great new tools.

I'm off to go find more new toys to play with!