Discovering Something New
Discovering something new?
This week’s task was something interesting. At first I clicked on each link and explored
a few links within each that appeared to interest me. With this method I was met with not only
difficulties, several pop-up widows and advertisements, but disappointment
overall. The sites at first glance
looked great and excited me in my anticipated exploration. For example, I was
interested in the punchfork website,
a recipe site and was met with an announcement that they had recently been
purchased by Pintrest and would no
longer have their own website. Finally after at least an hour of clicking and
getting nowhere I was able to settle on some of my secondary choices.
The first site I was able to access and sign up for was
“kickresume”. This was a site that had preset
templates to create resumes. After
signing in it immediately prompts for your information. The site itself had a
very user friendly design and the ability to save as often as you would like
along with a preview option throughout.
It had easy tabs on the side to make the different sections to a resume
easy to access and update as well. The final stage would be to download your
finished resume as a PDF in order to print. The site had all that I personally enjoy in a site by being; user
friendly, free and not really time consuming to access / develops. However, I teach 7th grade and
wouldn’t really have a purpose for the site in my current classroom. I do feel it would be a great site for older
students or even personal usage.
The next site I explored was fontpro. At first glance I immediately thought the site would be a
great way to template things for a school paper or year book. In digging deeper I came to realize that the
site is rather limited. There isn’t a preview
feature, but rather just a download feature as an html file. This limits things and would definitely
complicate things for my 7th grade students. I did enjoy the ability to navigate throughout
the site and having the ability to quickly change fonts and other elements on
the site was definitely a plus.
Finally, my last exploration for this was by far my most
enjoyable. After reading several
sections of Untangling the Web I decided
to take a deeper look into Capzles
and I was glad I did. Capzles ability to
take content and make it interactive intrigued me, I particularly like the idea
of using the site in conjunction with Prezi, documents, photos, PowerPoint’s
and other resources from previous year
to give an overview of the year
ahead. I plan to use this gather
material as the year moves forward. As I
have started to implement this plan I realized that uploading a PowerPoint is a
bit tricky and visually it didn’t come out exactly as I had hoped. However, I still like how Capzles is set up. It reminds me greatly of using IMovie and
programs similiar type of program.
Although this version allows me to use it and edit it as I want where IMovie,
when finished cannot be changed again. I
immediately thought that this would be a fantastic way to introduce myself and
my class to parents at open houses.
References:
Bellow, A. & Dembo, S. (2013) Untangling the
Web: 20 Tools to Power Up Your Teaching. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin
Press.
Websites:
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