Thing #14: Exploring E-tools

Looking through the list, I realized that I had already started using many of the tools in the past year for class. This is, of course, thanks to our wonderful staff development opportunities as well as our fabulous librarian, who keeps me up-to-date with tools she thinks will help me reach my ESL kids in a different way.

So, with Wordle (my favorite app), Blabberize, Writeboard, PicNik, Quizlet, PollDaddy, and Mixbook out of the running, I narrowed my other options down based on personal preferences and chose to explore both TimeGlider and Ta-Da List.

Despite the fact that I'm a sucker for to-do lists and calendars, I don't do a whole lot of that online. However, I found that I may use Ta-Da List to make sure that my students can keep track of the requirements for their projects online, as they have such a problem keeping track of the many, many papers we give them.

My favorite of the two, however, was TimeGlider. I think it's wonderful for our students to analyze informational texts and to practice their sequencing. In fact, I plan to use it for the 8th graders as we study The Diary of Anne Frank this year. This way, they can identify the "plot-like elements" in the diary through plotting the most important events on a timeline in TimeGlider.