Reflection on October 22nd 2015

Today in class we completed a jigsaw activity in order to learn about various Web 2.0 Tools. The class was divided into four coloured groups and each group investigated 5 different tools. My group investigated how to use comic strips, such as ToonDoo, in order to make a comic strip about any topic. We then investigated Word Clouds, such as Wordle. There are various benefits of using a word cloud, such as helping students improve their vocabulary, it can be a really engaging introductory activity to get to know your students, or it can be used as a self-assessment tool when writing. The next tool we investigated was Photo Peach, which collects a series of photos and creates a slideshow presentation. Vimeo was investigated as a resource to create videos in the class and as a unique tool for storytelling. Finally, we looked at Coggle. This tool was similar to Popplet in that it makes mind maps. I found Coggle much easier to use and better laid out than Popplet as it was easier to break off an idea and show relationships. I can really see myself using this in my future classrooms.

In our coloured groups we investigated our five tools and discussed our ideas over a chat room. My peers in the chat room had great ideas for integrating these tools into both our genius hour projects, and our future classrooms. Our groups then jig sawed and broke up into numbered groups and we met with people from other coloured groups. We learned about all the tools each person had investigated. I learned about tons of tools, most of which I can no longer remember the name of. When I have time I plan to go back to the different documents, create one master post of the different resources with a quick blurb about each. I believe that this will be more beneficial in my future and will encourage me to actually incorporate the different technologies I learned about into my classroom.

After we were done with our jigsaw groups we went back to our computers and chose one of the tools to help us create a visual for our learning objectives for our genius hour project. I chose to use a cool program called Easel.ly. Although it took me quite a bit of time, I am really happy with the end result! I created a poster that had a mind map, outlining the essential parts of my genius hour project. It is now posted under My Learning Objective page (check it out here!)