Interactives

http://dcpspublic.oncoursesystems.com/school/webpage.aspx?id=842265

This morning I was thinking about how my school district purchased OnCourse systems to manage lesson plans, documents, gradebooks, learning schedules etc. It also offered a class website for the teacher to use. Mine is in the link above, hope you enjoyed by the way.

Anyhow I know that most of my colleagues don't really use their website and I thought that maybe it's just because they are not sure how to make it fun for their students to use. If you looked at the URL it generates you will notice that ours is long and complicated, and therefore hard to hand out to parents. So sometimes implementing the use of a website can have it's challenges.

Years ago I started setting my class website as the homepage for students when they log in to the computers. This was great because I could display my instructions for their computer work and change it every week so that it stayed fresh. Plus they were only allowed to use the tabs that I linked in so there was less potential for students to wander onto sites that they did not belong on. But still it wasn't really all that exciting for my students, especially when you consider all the websites that you have to compete with. It wasn't until I worked on a virtual book club with a couple of classes in South Carolina that I saw the potential of interactives like the Voki above. We used these to introduce ourselves to our new virtual classmates and they had a lot of fun doing it.

Now my students are second graders so I had to assist them a lot with these. However if you teach 4th grade and up your students should not have any problems copying and pasting the embed codes into Edmodo or whatever platform they might be using. Here are a few examples from my class.




There is an option to purchase a classroom plan complete with access to all the talking avatars which include historical figures and world figures. Imagine the potential for role playing as a lesson. If you teach middle or high school students this is an excellent way to get them engaged in learning the otherwise mundane subjects of American History, and World History.

The other interactive we started using was called Padlet, which used to be called Wallwisher. The Wallwisher team made some excellent changes to their offering and now Padlet is also an amazing tool that can be for everything from a suggesting box to a discussion board. You can use it for PD or for classroom projects. Students can add links, photos, and files. Plus they embed nicely on Edmodo or other websites. Here is an example of one that if you are reading this I would like for you to comment on. Check back later to this blog because I may add more useful interactives to it later on. And if you have any suggestion for a good interactive to use in the class, post it to the board below.

Created with Padlet