We started with a poem the kids wrote in their English class about their greatest fear.  They spent some time using audacity where they created an audio track for their poem. A music intro was added and they then exported the audio as an mp3. The kids analyzed the words they used in the poem and then started
looking for different images that might represent these words. They found graphics for their video and uploaded the graphics and audio to Animoto. After setting things up in Animoto they exported the video to Youtube.

The next step was to create a poster. After some discussion about different design considerations the kids created a glog. The glog needed to include  appropriate graphics, as well as, the text and video copy of their poem. The students then posted this to their blog and english wik and on the whole it worked quite well.

For the next semester I need to tidy up a few areas. Some students have had
difficulty embedding the glog into their blog or into their wiki. Also I need to create a rubric that helps them better understand the expectations I had for their audio instead of just having a rubric for the poster. Our equipment is not that great but the work they did on the audio could have been better. I also need to get into the habit of screencasting the different parts as with our schedule they forget a lot from week to week.

Anyhow here are some examples. Will be adding more later today.

http://alishan.glogster.com/AVP-Fear-Poem/

Recently they added the capabilities of adding a Gform to a widget or your tweets as you can see on my sidebar. All sorts of possibilities.

• go to GReader and looked at my Newsearch for Facebook and Privacy
• locate an article I want to add to the Facebook slideshow
• clicked on bookmark on the Diigo toolbar
• selected the list I wanted this bookmark to be a part of
• the article then becomes part of the Webslides slideshow

• moving information from Wordpress to Gsites is a straightforward copy and paste
• miss the flexibility of creating a Menu system in Wordpress..but Gsites is more of a wiki
• both handle Youtube videos well
• easy to embed a Google Calendar into a Gsite (have not tried that with Wordpress)
• a Google Document can easily be embedded in both Gsites and Wordpress
• cannot embed anything else into my Gsite (Vidller or Jing screencasts)
• site changes can be subscribed to through email updates but only for owners and collaborators
• no RSS feeds in Gsites cannot imagine managing a class of Gsites without RSS feeds

I read a Lifehacker post about creating an RSS feed from Gmail labels. This would be a work around for the lack of RSS feeds.

Using a Gmail label for Gsites RSS Feeds

I exported all of my links to an HTML file deleted many of the links, then started using Zotero more and more. I have not found anything that comes close to Zotero to help with information management . It keeps a local copy of the website and allows you to markup and annotate that copy. It is, however, machine resident and does not allow for social bookmarking. When you have a lab with individual accounts this works fine but if the students are using one account then the Zotero bookmarked information could become a mixture of multiple students work dealing with unrelated topics (this could be circumvented with proper collection management and tagging).

I had also been looking at Diigo. I had been signed up with Diigo for a while but started looking at in more closely when I saw how you could create slideshow from a list of bookmarked sites (this Diigo slideshow for my students is an example) The one thing I noticed about Diigo is that it might be a one stop center for creating bookmarks. One click saves the bookmark to diigo, furl and Del.icio.ous.

As I started looking at this even more I started wondering if diigo might be used to help with grading student blogsites as you can comment on different parts of an online document. This Voicethread explains what I mean. By the way is it Diego or Deego or what?