Exploration

I decided to sit down this afternoon and spend a good chunk of time exploring some of the sites that we have been talking about in class. There is a lot of neat stuff out there. My brain officially hurts.
Here are some of the conclusions that I have made after my multi-hour exploration into the world of web 2.0.
- I really like diigo as a bookmarking site. It reminds me of a program that I learned about last year that went with the smart board system. This site is awesome because it comes with a toolbar that highlights, adds sticky notes, and comments to any website. This would be great to use for instruction or for students to use when doing research. It would help them to learn how to sort through information and take notes on information that they need.
- I also really liked the online stopwatch and surveymonkey. Last year I did a project with my science students where they had to design a parachute using a variety of materials like wax paper, coffee filters, fabric, and plastic bags. Their goal was to make the parachute that stayed in the air the longest. It turned out to be a great project but because all of my stopwatches malfunctioned I was not able to complete the data analysis portion of the project. The online stopwatch would have been perfect for this project.
- Surveymonkey is awesome as well. I have created my own survey so I am waiting for the results before I explore the website more. This would be a great tool to teach kids about data collection and how to communicate the results. I would like to find out if/how the results could be downloaded into excel to create graphs. That would be a great way to combine a math and science into one lesson.