Five Web 2.0 apps for the classroom

Well, our last day of school was last Friday. Actually, students were gone at 1:00 on Thursday. Like always, the year has flown by. I was sitting here thinking of all the different apps I used in the classroom over the course of the year and decided to list some of my favorites, or more important those that the students liked using the most.

Animoto was by far the favorite among students this semester. We used the app for several different projects, and towards the end of the year, when students had their choice of apps to use, a good portion of them chose Animoto to make videos. The cool thing about the app is that it takes hardly any time to learn, and the students can produce high quality videos in a couple of class periods. It is also free. Just check out the Animoto for Education page and register. They will give you a promo code so all of your students can have their own account.

Though students only used this app for the last month of class, GoAnimate was right up there with Animoto as a favorite of students. This app allows students to make animated comic movies. Some of my students were glued to this program and, once I showed it to them, this is all they wanted to do. Honestly, I had a few students who are generally not interested in school at all produce some nicest work with this app. It was the most interest in learning that I had seen from some of my students all year.

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Comment by Kitty Tripp on June 9, 2010 at 5:44pm: Jeremy, I have been following several of your blogs postings, and am very interested in many of the sites you have listed. Have you found these sites are more appropriate for highschool student or could they also be used for upper elementary school students (4th and 5th Grade)? Were you comic strip and animated projects used as a grade within a unit of study? Did you use a rubric to assess these projects. I'm interest to learn more, and I'll be following your posts. Thanks!

Comment by Jeremy Kaiser on June 12, 2010 at 6:54am: I think that most of these sites could be used with lower grades as well as high school. The one thing to remember is that many of them are social networking ( or media networking) in nature and come of the content can be crude. However, I if students are creating and not spending time looking through other content, it's not that big of a problem.

I do give grades based on a rubric. I will post some of these rubrics for you to see.

Comment by Jeremy Kaiser on June 12, 2010 at 7:17am: Kitty, I just posted a rubric on Docstoc. Click here to see the rubric. It is nothing fancy, and I just made it on Rubistar. However, I like things simple when doing a project like this. I find that with project like GoAnimate, students really rise to the task and do their best work.