Thing 12: Exploring Web 2.0 tools

All I have to say is: Blabberize made my day!!! My husband and I have a joke that were it possible, we would pay money for our dog to have the ability to talk for a day. Well, Blabberize is the next best thing, and it's FREE! I knew my kids would love playing around with it, too, so I incorporated it into their autobiography project in Language Arts. I hope to post at least one sample soon...it's taking a while as I mentioned in my last post. : ( It's not taking forever as far as the website is concerned; it's just the students finding images that's dragging on and on. Anyway, enough of that topic.
Because I'm hypersensitive to what kind of shenanigans the kids could get into online, I put some thought into creating an account for my class Blabbers. I made an account name that all my students use that is attached to an email address I have that they do not know. I am the only one with the account password. Since only I have the password, that does mean that I have to be around everytime they want to save their Blabber, but it only takes a second to type in and it prevents them from getting on during the summer and posting something inappropriate under my name. Another function of Blabberize that I like is the ability to make the Blabbers private. Blabberize has the social aspects of a Web2.0 site because you can search Blabbers that have already been created and comment on them. Additionally, before you are able to save your Blabber you must title it, create a brief description, and provide tags, other aspects of Web 2.0. But again, thinking about the safety of my students I will keep their Blabbers private in our account. Also, some students are using Google Images and I don't want to publish those for all to see on the web.
As for how Blabberize can function in a class, I see kids creating Blabbers as characters from a novel they're studying. They have the ability to make multiple characters talk in one picture, or have characters engage in a dialogue, switching back and forth between pictures. Pretty cool and if a microphone is not available, you can call in your audio over the phone.
Another tool I got very excited about was Doing Text. Revision is a major part of the writing process and online 'peer sharing' is so much more fashionable these days. Making revisions online is a bit neater and easier to read. It also allows for the student to do the work in a comfy setting and affords them a bit of time to think about what he wants to say. I also thought that different classes could offer comments on one piece. For example a lit class taught by me and the same class taught by another teacher could share class notes and ideas on the same piece of literature. Or what about some cross-curricular learning? Say you're reading a historical work and need some inforamtion about what the social climate was during that time? You could hook the writing up with a history class and get info line by line.

Now, the selling point for Doing Text is that you don't have to sign up to use it. You can simply send the URL out and get comments on the text. I didn't find that to be the case on the demo, but maybe that was because it was just for practice. I'll have to check into that more later.