Well I just wasted a good hour of my life....The first site that caught my interest was Pinterest, I had heard of the site on Facebook when my friends would post things about it, but I didn't really know what it was. Right away I was hooked! When simply entering the home page there were a ton of cute and interesting pictures, recipes, quotes and wide variety of cute, eye catching, and fascinating things that people from all over where sharing. This site is designed so one can create their own page and keep track of things that they find that they simply "like" or want to remember, where other people can view their page as well. The site mentions that people will use it for a variety of things, even planning for weddings! This could be used in a classroom or two for the teacher and students to post things and share ideas. Coming from a social studies point of view, in my class i could use it to post any pictures, quotes, comics, and anything pertaining to topics in my class.
The next site I looked at was Photoshow, which is a site that helps you easily put together a slide show of pictures with music and transitions, and I have always wanted to do this! It appears to be really easy and you can upload straight from your computer or facebook. This could be utilized in my classroom very easily, instead of a boring power point i could put a few pictures from a war, for example, and add some music from the time period. I am sure my students would be much more entertained and willing to pay attention when I can use new technology like this to portay history from a point of view they are not used to!
The final site i looked at was History Pin....I think it is quite obvious why i chose this one! I was so excited to find this while looking through travel sites. This site is for people to post pictures from their travels all over the world, from theirs and their families histories. I am sure I could spend hours reading stories and looking at pictures. I find it very important that my students retain information that i teach them and if i were to use this site to give them specific examples and accounts from the time period rather than handing them a boring text book, they and I will enjoy the class even more!
We will look at a competitor to Photoshow on February 7. Animoto is another slideshow program that is easy for kids to use- I used it in my AP World History course as an introductory activity to Central American History. My students had to find pictures that illustrated key concepts from their texts and produce a short music video. Very cool!
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