Campus Hunting

The last couple of weeks we worked on a scavenger hunt themed towards our specific program areas. The scavenger hung I participated in was social studies oriented and involved finding items around campus that had political and historical relevance. We worked in groups and used either cameras or iPhones. My group used an iPhone camera and shared them with each other via a dropbox upload from the phone.

Once the photos were uploaded we individually worked on editing the photos and creating an album in Picasa Web albums. We organized the album and named the photos according to the scavenger hunt list. Once the album was complete we created a slideshow and uploaded it to our websites. We did a similar process with photos we found online to create a google presentation. The photos I used were of U.S. Presidents from the 20th century.



Scavenger Hunt

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U.S. Presidents of the 20th Century

Wonderful Word Clouds with Wordle

This week began the web 2.0 presentations. The first group up was Wordle, which is a program where you can make word clouds. The program was interesting but I didn't see how it could be super useful in a classroom. The presenting group went over certain things you could use word clouds for like vocabulary lessons or listing student names. I'm sure there are more uses that I'm just missing but at first glance it Wordle didn't seem that useful. I'm sure the word clouds would be great for posters in the classroom which is helpful because I am lacking artistically. I suppose another use would be to use the word clouds to spice up assignments so that its more than just a sheet of paper with directions. I hate that this web 2.0 didn't really excite me too terribly much and hopefully I'll be more excited for the others to come.

Toasty Timelines: Using Timetoast

Timetoast is the Web 2.0 tool my group was assigned. The site is designed to help the user create timelines, which is especially useful for social science classes but also helpful with other subjects. For the Web 2.0 assignment our group split our wiki page into sections and we each completed it separately in a Google Doc. Once we checked each other's work and all agreed that it was complete, we transferred the data from the Google Doc to the wiki page. My part of the wiki page was the overview, as well as the strengths and weaknesses. As mentioned before, the site is designed for creating timelines and requires creating an account (a simple task). It had plenty of strengths, but also a few weaknesses. Any timelines created on the site can be uploaded to the server for all members with a publish button. Timelines can be printed off of the site by placing them into text view, a feature provided by Timetoast.