Thing 14

I really enjoyed this Learning 2.0 activity. Everything was easy to navigate and I thought a lot of the tools were applicable to the classroom. I first went to gliffy.com. I decided to look at the Venn diagram tool. I LOVE Venn diagrams. I know that I will want to use this in my classroom. It is a great concrete way to compare and contrast different subjects. Some of the common core standards actually pertain to comparing and contrasting, and I think this will be useful. This website only allowed you to do 5 different things for free and without signing up for an account. I did a simple Venn Diagram. It was very user friendly. I also played around with the flowcharts. I also love flowcharts. I am actually doing a lesson plan on teaching 2nd graders to write a personal narrative. A template like this could really be useful. I also played around with the floor plan tool. This was neat looking, but I couldn't quite get the hang of it. It may be useful in creating your classroom layout. But like I said, this was little harder for me to navigate, so I did not spend too much time on it. The next one I went to was the mindmeister. I thought it was need that I could sign in with my facebook account. Although I have enjoyed this 23 things project, I have not liked having to creating so many accounts. I went to the brainstorming tool first. This was fairly easy. I chose the topic of Inclusion and put it in my first bubble. I then branched off into different bubbles including laws and different exceptionalities that teachers see in the gen ed classrooms. I liked this tool. I think that brainstorming templates help students organize their thoughts and help them during the pre-writing process of a paper. I liked how it stored all of your projects in a folder too.This site was great that it made it easy to share your maps with others. But in order to do this you have to pay for an upgrade. There was an upgrade option that included a monthly fee. Although it wasn't expensive, there are too many free templates online for what I need. It is true that is makes sharing easy. I guess a teacher that had a site for parents could show examples of brainstorming with one click verses e-mailing or sending copies home for parents to see. I liked both of these sites. I just prefer the FREE sites with templates verses these.