My fifth graders have been using Glogster to create digital posters. Each chose an important moment in history and was going to highlight facts about that event as well as explain its importance. Today when we went to login to complete the project we received this screen below.
The kids could not access their projects and I had to think very quick on my feet. We made a quick turn and used Nota for the day and I'll have them write an evaluation comparing the two tools for homework. But still! What the what, Glogster? No notice? The students were on the site as late as yesterday!?!
I've been using Notawiki for a new partnership project for World Leadership School between Groton School, American School in Marrakech, and Welham Boys and Girls School in Dehradun, India. Our project focuses upon geometry in art and architecture between three different countries/cultures. The primary mode of sharing project outcomes will be the wiki and I was so excited at the streamlined and graphic interfact offered by notawiki.
Here are some lessons learned: 1. It gets hung up sometimes. For no clear reason, it will not load pages in the "notebook" (what they call a site) when linked together. The only solution I have come across is to close the browser entirely (not just the page--that doesn't work.) This is annoying.
2. Their integration of youtube videos is amazingly seamless. I created a screencast using Camstudio (my first time using this tool) and uploaded it to youtube. From there, I searched for it in the embedded notawiki searchbox for youtube and voila! It appeared instantly.
3. I can't figure out how to embed other Widgets. I emailed the staff, but no response yet.
4. One of the awesome features is that you don't "SAVE" the pages. They are autosaved. Here's the tricky part of that. Let's say you drop in two text boxes. One is the title of the page and one is navigation with links to other pages. If you UNTHINKINGLY position the navigation box slightly above the title box, then the autosave function will rename the page with the text in whatever box is highest on the page. This makes it MIGHTY tricky to try to link pages to one another in the "link" box because it's not obvious what the page name is. EASY Solution: Put the title box highest on the page. Note to notawiki makers: This would make a great FAQ question.
5. Next week, we'll be trying out the highly touted feature that many users can update at the same time. Please, please live up to the hype!
The August 2009 Issue of Tech & Learning had a Top Tweets section...so I'm kind of lurking in Twitterville without having to actually tweet, I guess. The question was "What's your favorite app?" The usual suspects are featured: voicethread, wordpress, voki,moodle. But in that list there was one new tool and I *think* I like it. Notaland is a new wiki tool that has a much more graphical interface. Students will respond to being able to make it look different than all the other wikis out there. Of course, it's free, as per usual for my criteria. Other neat features: It links automatically to the flickr copyright free images database, and you can tilt/size all those pics onscreen--something some other wikis don't allow. You can then embed those pages on another blog and whatnot. The picture here is me playing around. Neat, huh? I mean, lame right now, but it'll be pretty cool once useful and definitely looks like a different kind of wiki page.
