When considering how a new technology will fit into your classroom, rather than looking for a place to ADD it, look for a way to replace what you're already doing.
The posting toolbar allows you to make many changes to the format, but the most popular ones we've used are photos and hyperlinks.
To add a photo, just click on the image that looks like a picture. Blogger will open a window that lets you search your computer or the web for the image(s) you want to add.
Note: If your students are selecting images from the internet, they should place a note at the bottom of the text that says something like "image credit: joe schmoe".
To add a link within the post, you either have to type the word(s) that contain the link (ie., click here), or type the actual link (ie., http://www.bloggingrocks.com). Once you've typed the words, you need to highlight them, then press the hyperlink button and past the actual URL into the window that appears.
Here are a few of the gadgets we use regularly on our blogs. See also the Web 2.0 Links list for other awesome, embed-able tools.
Clustrmaps & Voki
Clustrmaps tell us where are visitors are from and Voki helps us to talk to them. Sometimes we use a Voki to do a "book talk" or make book characters talk to each other.
Shelfari
Readers love to share books!
When we recommend a book to a friend, it's because we really loved it!
Countdown Clocks
We are always thinking and planning for the future. Countdown clocks help us to remember important dates. It's fun to countdown days, hours, minutes, and seconds to the events we look forward to the most!
We are great at creating Keynotes to share what we've learned. Slideshare helps us embed those presentations on our blogs so we can teach our classmates:
It's easy to upload a picture and write a sentence about it, but it's lots more fun to use Superlame to add vocabulary labels or to have the people or items in an image speak for themselves:
What would you say to Ratty Tatty if she kept stealing your snacks? With I Fake Text students can create fake conversations with book characters, historical figures and more!
In Kindergarten, we use Wordle or Taxedo to practice typing the words we're learning to read. When finished typing, we create a "word cloud". We can put that single image on our blogs, or, like this second grader's example, we can upload several word clouds into Animoto to "produce" our own videos:
We are work in groups to take photos of our alphabet pictures. After that, we work together to record ourselves in a Voicethread.
Note: If your students are selecting images from the internet, they should place a note at the bottom of the text that says something like "image credit: joe schmoe".
