Jux is a stunning image-based alternative to what you might call ordinary blogging and allows the user to make impactful statements and delightful slideshows using their six different posting styles – slideshow, photo, block quote, photo, video, article and countdown.
Pictures can be uploaded from your own hard-drive or sourced from services such as Facebook, Flickr or Instagram.
Jux can be used by teachers to introduce or reinforce topics or, even better, by the students themselves as the culmination of a research or creative writing project.
Currently, as far as I can see, Jux only allows one Jux per user. It would be fantastic if students and teachers could have different Juxes for different topics or projects under the same main account. It would also be fabulous if individual pages from Jux could be printed out to form part of classroom displays. I wonder if Jux is listening…
Triptico is an excellent resource for teachers to use in conjunction with their interactive whiteboards that currently contains around 20 different interactive resources – all of which can be easily edited, adapted and saved for later use.
Because Triptico is an application that runs in your computer (it runs on Adobe Air, so it’s compatible with both Macs and PCs), it can be used with any make and model of interactive whiteboard. This and the fact that it is free makes Triptico an absolute must have for every teacher wishing to make better use of technology in the classroom to engage students and foster classroom participation.
Once you have installed and launched the application, you can explore the different activities available by scrolling from left to right in the main screen or simply by clicking on favourites, which returns an very handy navigation pane.
From there you can easily navigate to any of the different interactive activity makers and you can then customise your own activities to suit your subject and lesson. As you can see, the resources on offer are often game-show inspired and range from (relatively) simple timers, image spinners and student selectors to games, quizzes and text analysis tools. The screenshots below give you an idea of the plethora of classroom-based interactive activities available:
Popplet is a fun and intuitive web application that allows you and your students to create galleries, mind maps and diagrams quickly an incredibly easily. I mean it. Ridiculously easily.
Pictures can easily be searched and added directly from Flickr and Facebook. The same applies to YouTube videos.
Popplets can then be shared on social networks or via email, exported as .jpg or .pdf files and embedded into websites. You can even invite others to collaborate on your popplets, enabling teacher-pupil collaboration or pair- and group-work.
Popplets can be created in the classroom with the aid of your students, live on the interactive whiteboard. Choose some relevant pictures from Flickr and then elicit vocabulary from the students, which you can then add to the popplet and link to the relevant picture. At the end of the lesson your students have a resource to help them with their written homework which they themselves had helped to create.
Watch this video to learn how to enhance your Smart interactive whiteboard using object animations, a feature of Notebook Version 10, the latest version of Smart board’s proprietary interactive whiteboard software.
If you missed some of the whizzy effects or builds that you can add to PowerPoint or Keynote presentations, such as fading objects in or out, spinning or flying objects across the screen, then you should upgrade to Notebook’s latest version.
These are just five simple ideas used in a Modern Languages context (Spanish), but they could easily be adapted to be used in any subject area. Although there are other bits and bobs you can do as regards object animation, this video focuses on:
Fading in
Fading out
Flipping
Flying
Spinning
Most of the inspiration for these ideas has come from James Hollis’s blog Teachers Love Smart Boards, a fantastic resource for all teachers who are learning to use interactive whiteboards, so ensure you bookmark it for future reference.
As ever, I hope you find this simple introduction to object animation in Notebook useful and don’t forget to let me know what you think.
The above is an animation by Adam, a year 8 pupil (12 years old) who has started learning German this term.
I have always enjoyed setting fun homework, as both my students and I find it’s a welcome change from the old exercise book. Every so often I set my younger students a comic writing ICT task. Whereas on previous occasions I’ve generally opted for Toondoo, this time I’ve gone for GoAnimate.
I set out to use GoAnimate to assess my student’s ability to produce a dialogue in German that would showcase their knowledge of the different vocabulary and grammatical constructions they have acquired this past half term. I simply tweaked this week’s schemes of work to include GoAnimate as an assessment tool, instead of a dialogue on a sheet of paper or exercise book.
During the course of three lessons this past week I introduced the tool to the students by showing them GoAnimate’s demo video on the Interactive Whiteboard (IWB). They were immediately engaged and couldn’t wait to go home and start writing in German! As you can imagine, a very welcome change!
I also laid out clear expectations of the quality and quantity of the work, as well as what was acceptable and what wasn’t in terms of content. We then spent the rest of the lesson drafting possible dialogues and enacting them in class.
Once I had received all the homework, i.e an email link to each student’s animation on GoAnimate, I carefully checked each student’s dialogue and made notes of common errors that had cropped up and followed them up in my next lesson with them.
I used the IWB again to show some of the animations containing the most common mistakes, such as ich hieße, instead of ich heiße, or simply missing out the capitals for nouns and then asked the students to comment on and assess each other’s work.
Although I didn’t take advantage of it on this occasion, GoAnimate also allows you to upload sound files, giving you the possibility to add voice recordings to the animation. On this occasion, as it was a homework task and I could not expect every pupil to have a microphone at home, I decided not to use this feature. It could, however, be successfully used if choose to do this type of work within lesson time in suitably equipped ICT rooms, for example.
Although it’s not something I wouldn’t do every week, mainly because both my students and I would bore quickly when the novelty’s worn off, it is certainly something I’d recommend doing every so often, at the end of a sequence of lessons, for example.
What do you think? Can you see yourself using GoAnimate in this way? Do you have any other suggestions?
I now need to go and find out what ein Bettlerhaste is…
Do you know of a teaching and learning resource you would like to share?
Please do not hesitate to get in touch.
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