Cool Sites 9/13

Each week I tweet several links to new tools I find through the blogs I subscribe to and read! Often, other members of my Personal Learning Network (PLN) will also find these links and provide examples. The best way to share these cool tools, lesson plans, and materials is to post them in a weekly series! If you enjoy this new series, you may want to subscribe to receive regular updates, leave a quick comment of how one of these tools helped you, tweet this, or share this series with your PLN through your RSS reader or Delicious account.

Multimedia Sites

Made up Memories is a site for students to insert their photos into several video adventures. Students choose an adventure such as skydiving, starring in a fairytale, or being a superhero! Mary Beth Hertz was super cool to help me out by creating a skydiving video! Students could create stories about these adventures and post them in a blog or wiki. This site is also very easy for English language users.
My Movie Moment, which I learned about from Ozge Karaoglu, the links queen on Twitter, works the same way with students inserting their photos. However, students get to choose from a variety of video clips from famous movies. Several of the movies they may have never watched and many are not PG so you have to use careful filtering with this site.
Earth Touch provides hi-definition video documentaries of nature. Think of this as the Discover Channel in your classroom!
Build a Jam will let you create and edit music collaboratively. Students sign-up for free and create a band. Then they upload mp3 files created on Audacity or Garageband. This web site could be used to create original music for podcasts, videos, or web sites. However, the teacher has limited possibilities of monitoring which music the student listens to and this could be a problem.

Literacy Sites

Pan Raven is a free site for creating digital stories. Students can use video, music, photographs, and text to create books or stories! Furthermore, the site offers photo editing tools and ways to share the story in a blog! This is another great site for English language learners. Check out Kaleigh Irwin’s Sixth Grade Summer Vacation digital story below!


Storybird is another site that offers students a way to create collaborative digital stories. To find out more information on this tool check out these blog posts. I recommend subscribing to these blogs like I have!

Read Print is a library of free online books and poetry for students and teachers.
Challenge:
Use one of these sites to improve a project for the school year!

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