This week, I visited Kathy Schrock’s Guide to
Everything to explore a variety of websites. The first site that I chose to
explore was a photo fun website called Dumpr.
This is a “freemium” Web 2.0 photo fun tool. It’s not required that you
register to create a free account, but it is strongly encouraged because it
gives you the opportunity to save and store your photos. Dumpr adds a variety
of fun effects to images from your computer, Facebook, Flikr, etc. After
working its magic, it allows the user to save or send the image. It also
connects to a variety of social media by giving you an embed code for several
websites including Facebook, Wordpress, and Blogger. It appeared to me as
though Dumpr has a social media aspect where you can follow other “friends” and
dialogue back and forth about pictures, but I could not find any of that
information very easily. My guess is that it is part of the paid membership. I
tried to figure that out, but did not have much success. When I looked for more
information on Dumpr, there was an old video on TeacherTube and also a link to
the Dumpr blog, but it seemed as though the blog hadn’t been updated since
2009. Evaluating this site as an educator, it would not rank very high on my
list of sites to devote class time to, but I do think that students would enjoy
it to add a little bit of spice to presentations and tech projects.
Under online audio editors, Creaza was the next site I chose to
explore. I was looking for something in similar functionality to Audacity so
that my students could have access to it anywhere, but I was happily surprised
that Creaza does way more than just edit audio. Creaza is not an American based
company, which is neat, but also proved frustrating to me more than once. There
are 9 different languages supported in Creaza and in the middle of my projects,
I was sometimes switched to another language. This made navigating around an
unfamiliar site very tricky! There are definite pros and cons to this. High
school language teachers might enjoy the challenge for their students, but as a
2nd grade teacher, this would be frustrating for mine. After reading
the blog, investigating some of the tools available, and checking the help
section of the website, I decided to sign up. You can have an individual free
account, but there is a fee for schools to use this site. One of the
frustrating things was that they wouldn’t tell you a fee up front. You had to
submit quite a bit of information to request a quote for your school. Dealing
internationally with no physical address linking to this website made me
uncomfortable. Other than that, Creaza was very relevant, engaging, and easily
accessible (with accounts) making it a great resource to use within the
classroom. The first thing I decided to try my hand at was Mindomo, which is an
online mind mapping tool. I found it pretty easy to navigate once I started
exploring, and I was surprised at the amount of features that were available with
the free subscription. I appreciated this tool because you could lay out your
mind map in the way that made sense to you and it was very easy to reposition
thoughts and ideas once you got them down onto the screen. You can save right
to your Creaza online account, which is nice for data storage and ease of
access for students to come back to the project at home. Projects can also be
edited and saved again, which is a very nice feature.
I then moved on to try my hand at the actual audio editing
software. Multiple times that I clicked on the AudioEditor tool, it brought me
a fresh screen, but it was in German! A few of my EDIM classmates might
appreciate that, but it was EXTREMELY frustrating for me! I went ahead and
tried to make a mixed sound effect anyway. Below is a screen shot of what I was
able to accomplish. It is a small sound clip of rushing water with horses
trotting through. The help section of the website was very helpful, and there
was even a YouTube video embedded into it, but when all of the sounds are in
German, I couldn’t decipher all of my options!
I know my students would love to use Creaza if I presented
it as an option. A few more features that are available include making cartoons
and movies! Creaza also has an app available for iPads, which I may look into
for the fall. I spent over an hour and a half on this site and could have been
there for a dozen more hours, but alas I had to keep moving.
The final site that I chose to explore was Zamzar – an online video converting site. Working
with students on digital storytelling projects, iPads, mp3 players, etc. leaves
teachers with a variety of media files. Sometimes it’s nice to convert them
into a usable format so that all students can work with them. Zamzar allows you
the opportunity to convert any file (up to 100MB) for free. All you have to do
is select your file, choose which format you would like it converted to, and
submit your e-mail address. It sounds quick, but this process takes quite a
while. Once you’ve received the e-mail that your file is converted, you have 24
hours to retrieve your converted file. As I was exploring the site, I found it
very user friendly, but full of advertisements. The help tab was well organized
and gave all of the information I needed. Like the other sites I checked out,
Zamzar also had a blog to give you up-to-date news and information and ways
that others were using the service. I chose not to register for a Zamzar
account, as it was a paid service of $7 a month. Since I wouldn’t use it that
much, I didn’t feel like this was a worthwhile investment for me. I did go
through the process of converting one of the videos I took on my iPhone to .wmv
format to see how the site worked. The e-mail came through within 30 minutes,
and I was easily able to download my new file! If I were going to use this
site, I personally wouldn’t send my students to it. I would do the leg work and
convert the files for them so that we were ready to go when it was time to publish
a technology project.
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