Wow...I so enjoyed being able to experience with a variety of data visualization tools and never knew there were so many resources available. It is always important for me to represent information in a variety of ways, including visual. A study I did in a previous course, allowed me to give a survey to my students asking what type of learner they are and how they learn best. I was not surprised when the results show most students are "visual" learners. These free visual tools allowed me to do just that and represent information in a visual and unique way. I would use many of these resources as a fifth grade teacher, but also professionally to share data or information with colleagues or parents.
I chose to experiment with three visual tools. I wanted to check out the comic resources because my fifth graders are all about comics and how fun for them to be able to use this type of format. The www.makebeliefscomix.com is awesome! It would be so great for my students and has many features that they would love. It allows the user to add any dialogue throughout the series of slides. This resource also allows one to choose from a cast of characters. It has a variety of objects and scenes that can be represented and of course it has talk/thought balloons or bubbles. I am going to have my fifth graders use this to recreate a personal narrative they have written during writing workshop. They will love it and I encourage you to check it out!
I also am interested in Glogster.edu, but you have to pay for a subscription. I think it would be wonderful to create collages such as the ones you can create on this site. Another resource I enjoyed learning about is www.timetoast.com. The fifth graders create a timeline and this is a much more interesting, interactive way for them to create their own timelines online. This can also be used as a reserach site to look up other timelines for other uses across the curriculum. For instance, I could use this site in my classroom to show the kids the timeline of famous women in history or the timeline of technology resources and web 2.0 tools, etc. There are a variety of uses for these timelines.
The last visual tool I learned about and created my own character map on is called bubbl.us. What a great way for students to represent their "mind maps" visually. We are always "brainstorming", "mind mapping", doing "character webs"...my fifth graders will love this! In fact, next week we are doing a character study on the main character, Rob Horton, from the book Tiger Rising by Kate DiCamillo (great read by the way if you are teaching social issues). I decided to use this visual tool to create my own character map from http://bubbl.us. I look forward to sharing this with you and also my students.
Hi Lindsay,
ReplyDeleteI really appreciate how you not only review each tool, but you also give a specific example of how you could use/plan to use each one in your classroom. Even though I teach a different grade level, your suggestions are helpful in getting me to start thinking about how I could integrate each application into my lessons. You make the tools sound interesting and fun, which makes me want to take the time to explore them, which is also a great quality.
I can see how this might be useful to chart action plans for a group of educators, and mapping out checkpoints to see if our plans are being assessed and working. Thanks for the demo!
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