AHS Social Media Web Toolbox

Students will explore various web tool applications of which they can utilize to enhance their learning and social experiences. Students will be learning and practicing digital literacy and responsibility, collaborating, creating, socializing, and organizing content, while practicing internet safety. This blog will be utilized to share the tools we explore in our class. Please visit the student's reflection blogs to see what they are learning and creating!

Monday, Feb. 28

Customize your Google homepage by adding a theme and gadgets. You can switch back and forth from iGoogle to Classic view.

One can benefit from having a "personalized home page" that gives you access to key information from across the web. iGoogle is one way of allowing to create your own "virtual locker". Personalized gadgets can be added to this self-designed page, including news, local weather, a personal calendar, to-do lists, encyclopedias, and many other time-saving tools that will help you organize and complete one's school work. There are educational gadgets such as the SAT/ACT Word of the Day and powerful gadgets like Google Reader, which brings together information from many sources.

Activity #1 - Create an iGoogle page to be used as your homepage.

Choose a theme. Add and arrange gadgets as directed.

Begin with the following:

Google News
GMail
Daily Literary Quote
USA Today News
Optical Illusion of the Day
Google Map Search
Wikipedia Search
Dictionary
Online English Grammar
Calendar
Livestrong Fitness Tip of the Day

Activity #2 - Add a post to your blog describing 3 of the gadgets you added to your iGoogle page and why you chose them. Include the # of current users for each gadget. Take a snapshot of your iGoogle page and post it on your blog as well.

Feb. 24 - Thursday

Visit each classmates blog and explore the tools they shared. Some of your classmates did not complete the assignment as you will find. Just go on and find classmates who did complete the assignment. You must visit everyone's blog - to see which tools interest you prior to starting the assignment. I will let you know when you can being your posts.

Create 2 separate blog posts - one for each tool.

What must include the following in each post:

An example of what you created using the tool
Link to the website
Logo of website if available
Description of tool, do you have to set up a user account, etc. - what it does.
How would you utilize this tool - opinion of tool

Your two blog posts are due by Monday. If you get finished you may explore more tools.

Tuesday, Feb. 22

Today's Goals:

Complete your research on 3 tools.

one per page
all on one page - the page can be as long as you would like (recommended) if you drag a picture down - the page gets longer

Embed the Notaland onto your blog

Click the Share tab - choose Embed (NOT BLOGGER)
Create a new post and paste the code to embed
Make sure you choose xs, and scroll bar on.

Look at Mrs. James example - over Notaland

Dropbox

Blog Backgrounds

http://templates.bloggertricks.com/

thecutestblogontheblock.com

shabbyblogs.com

Friday, Feb. 18

Continue to explore Internet tools - see Thursday's post for websites of which you can find various tools. Take the time to really search and explore. You will need to add minimum of three cool tools that you feel others would benefit from knowing about.

Tuesday, February 15 - Nota

Today you will explore Nota!

Create an account and create a notebook.
Explore this site! Add pictures, text, video to a notebook.
Collaborate with a classmate.
Chat
Become familiar with site - so you will be ready to collaborate on a project with a classmate next week.

ASSIGNMENT

You are to create a digital, interactive notebook portraying information about a Web Tool that you have researched and feel would be important for other students to learn about.
You will need to search for the following media elements to include in your notebook:

Video tutorial - Add a how to video on one or more of your tools.
Examples of the tool in use (pictures, etc.)
How-to-guides (printed tutorial)
Explanation of the Web tool, etc.
Add links/websites of your tools
Describe each tool.
Minimum of 3 tools
Embed your Notaland notebook into your blog! - we will do this together

Create a Nota page on your favorite web tools or sites! Utilize the following websites to find some NEW tools!
Cool Tools for Schools

Nota is casual collaboration.
Mash your ideas and media together with friends in a dynamic whiteboard wiki. Using photos, videos, and other web content you can instantly create brainstorms, presentations, scrapbooks, and collaborate with others on a project (chat with up to 50 people at a time).

Nota is a unique, cutting-edge collaborative web platform that allows users to create, share and collaborate on presentations and virtually any other form of online material. Using Nota’s proprietary toolset, users can instantly integrate text, video, maps, clip art, photos from web album or on the local computer, or license-free images from Flickr, and material from an ever-expanding array of sources. Users can then instantly embed their work in Facebook or blogs, and can share and collaborate with friends.

http://notaland.com/

Friday, February 11

Today you will:

Create a Google Document and share it on the web.
Add the Google Document as a link to your link list across the top of your page.
Explore Nota and Imagination Cubed - see post below. Which are presentation/collaboration tool websites.
Add your email account to the email link list on the class blog.
Collaborate with others in the class room on Nota and Imagination Cubed.

Collaboration - Presentaton - Doodle Websites

Imagination Cubed - click here!

This collaborative drawing tool provides different brushes, stamps, and other features. Invite others by email to participate in your artwork.

With Imagination Cubed you can email a friend to have them draw with you! FUN!!!! And chat at the same time. You can create a design and email the design to a friend. Once your drawing is complete click replay and it will "replay" your drawing!

Nota is casual collaboration.

Mash your ideas and media together with friends in a dynamic whiteboard wiki. Using photos, videos, and other web content you can instantly create brainstorms, presentations, scrapbooks, and collaborate with others on a project (chat with up to 50 people at a time).

Monday, Feb. 7

Please go to www.Tagxedo.com - we will explore this for about 15 minutes.

We will then move on to creating talking messages - email messages.

Talking Emails/Messages

Oddcast Widgets - various talking messages! Have FUN!

E-trade Talking Baby - on this website you can add your own picture and even a picture of your pet will work! Email the talking message to someone, or embed it onto your webpage, or place it on your social networking page.
Career Builder Monk-e-mail - on this website you can send an email message that is a talking monkey.
Arby's Juniorize Me - add your own picture and have it speak the message - eyes and mouth move. You can either email it embed it onto your blog or any website.
Jibjab

Created on E-trade - I created a talking dog message. To see an example of the BabyMail - click here

Tagxedo

Visit Tagxedo

You can use Tagxedo to create visually stunning word clouds like the one I embedded in this post by inserting words (e.g. speeches, news articles, letters, slogans, themes, and so on). You can do so by uploading a document, entering a URL or simply by pasting text into the appropriate field. Tagxedo will size words appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurrence within the body of text, leaving out small words like “is”, “are”, “do”, etc.

With just one click, you can rotate the cloud, modify its colors and font, and also alternate between themes and shapes as you please. You can even upload your own images and have the word cloud assume the shape of the image.

Assignment 1

Create a word cloud from your blog!
Create a post displaying your image and a link so that visitors to your blog can create their own!

Create your own Snow Flake - Snow Days

Thursday, February 3

Please complete Assignment 1 when class begins.

Assignment 1

Last week you explored gadgets on blogger. You added gadgets to your blog. Please create a blog post about bloggers gadgets. What gadgets did you find/explore? What gadgets did you add to your blog? What are the benefits of adding gadgets to your blog. Please give directions on how a person can add their own gadgets to their blog.

Today's topic: Favicon

How can one miss the Blogger logo in orange and white, which happens to be its default favicon for any blog. But have you thought of customizing your own favicon and display it in your blog. Adding your own favicon is not just branding your blog but also adds up some sense of professionalism too.

Add a custom favicon to your Blogger blog: "What is a favicon?

The word “favicon” is short for “favorite icon”, and is a 16x16px square icon which is associated with a website (or blog). Browsers which support favicons will usually display a website’s favicon in the address bar (to the left of the URL), and next to the page’s name in a list of bookmarks. Browsers which support tabbed navigation (such as Firefox and IE8) will also display the favicon next to the page title on each tab."

Bloggers favicon is to the left of the URL

Before creating your favicon some of the basic points you should keep in mind is that your favicon icon have to be a small image of size 16 x 16 pixels and with an .ico extension. However, you can also use .GIF and .PNG in this case. A very easy and time saving step in creating your icon is to go for one of the free services such as:

FAVICON WEBSITE CREATORS

FaviconGenerator.com (right click image and choose “Save image as”)
HTML-Kit favicon generator (download as favicon package) – Enables you to create a static or animated favicon; you can even create a favicon quickly using your Twitter username!
favicon.cc

Alternatively you can download a “ready made” favicon from these sites:

Favicons R Us
FreeFavicon.com
Iconlet.com (use the 16 px square version of your favourite icon)

HOW TO CHANGE YOUR FAVICON

Favicon

Add the reference for your favicon to your Blogger template

The final step to creating a custom favicon for Blogger is referencing the favicon in your Blogger template code.

To do this, go to Layout>Edit HTML in your Blogger template. You do not need to check the “Expand widget templates” box.

Search for the closing </head> tag in your template using your browser’s search function.
Immediately before this line, paste the following section of code, substituting YOUR-FAVICON-URL for the URL where your favicon is hosted:

<link href='YOUR-FAVICON-URL' rel='shortcut icon'/>
<link href='YOUR-FAVICON-URL' rel='icon'/>

Then save your template. Now when you view your blog in your browser, you should see your favicon appear beside the web address and in the bookmarks folder (if you have bookmarked your site).
Note: it is very important that you paste the favicon tags just before the closing </head> tag, not earlier in the template code. This is because Blogger generates favicon tags when your blog pages are generated which would otherwise override your custom favicon references.