Thursday, 26 April 2012

YouTube for School


I think that YouTube for school is a very important step in evolving the dynamics of the the classroom.  With this website teachers are now able to teach lessons to their students and also show them educational videos that will help to reinforce their points.  At Notre Dame Highschool on Guam, every classroom now has a TV monitor in it and teachers show the kids YouTube videos to the give the kids a better chance to visual learn whatever they were talking about in class.  For example in the math class, when the teacher shows the kids how to solve a problem on the board, she then goes on to YouTube and looks for tutorials on the the math subject they are doing and lets the kids watch it as she walk around the classroom providing additional assistance.

Xtranormal
Xtranormal.com is an amazing website that my teacher told me about.  For a homework assignment he asked us to make a video that taught a particular subject. He told me about the Xtranormal.com site and he showed us a video that he had made from the website.  I thought it was super cool! Xtranormal.com allows you to create an animation video.  You are able to pick the background setting, the background sounds, the actors or characters for the video, and then you type in the dialogue that your characters will say.  The making of it is very fun and interactive for the user and you feel very good to be able to say that you created a sort of cartoon show.  Here is an example of a video that i made from the Xtranormal.com website.

PlayKidsGames


If you have young children who are more interested in video games then doing school work, then i suggest you try playKIDsgames.com.  It is a webpage that caters to ages kindergarden to 8th grade and provides interactive games that touch on many school subjects like geography, math, history, english, and spelling.  Kids nowadays seem to respond better to learning that is more visual, so this website is a good way to help intrigue interest in learning.  This website is not a substitute for school but sort of like a way for kids to reinforce what they learned in their classes.  The website site is very colorful and interactive and most of the images you see on the page interact when you place your mouse on them.  So enjoy the games you find and tell others about it. 
Are you tired of killing trees and not having that go green attitude?  There is no need to be angry anymore because Scriblink is going to help you share notes with friends without killing a single tree.  What is Scriblink you ask?  Scriblink is an online sketchpad that you can type notes on and share with friends.  Everyone is invited to use it, whether your two friends who enjoy talking to each other through notes, or your a student studying with a classmate.  Scriblink offers chat boxes, invite options, and advanced editing tools to help inhance your communication experiance.  The website is also free to use and does not charge a dime to the users.  I highly recommend Scriblink to all people, so lets use it and save the environment. (:
This particular website is something that I needed back when I was in high school.  The WolframAlpha website is a search engine that allows you to type in math problems and then it shows you how to figure those problems out. The WolframAlpha website is a center for mathmatica which is the culmination of computing algorisms or learning different math lessons, like geometry or calculus.  In the present day, like in the past, math has been a very difficult subject for most of our students.  Indroducing WolframAlpha to them, gives them the opportunity to solve math equations the right way because the website takes them on a step by step method to solving the question instead of the usual method of looking in the back of the book for the answer. The website is interactive and easy to learn and I believe it will be a great help to our kids.  If you think thats all then you are sadly mistaken.  The website is also a search engine which you can find information on other things but it is mostly based on certain school subjects like math, geography, or science.  It is not like google search engine where you can look up almost anything but mostly you can find scholarly information.

Wednesday, 25 April 2012

Diigo.com
Diigo.com is a website that is perfect for a variety of people.  If you are a busy student who constantly does research for classes, Diigo.com, allows you to highlight text and then save it in their library cloud, so you can access it later.  If you are a busy CEO for a larger company and constantly on the go, then Diigo.com is perfect for you becasue it can be accessed anywhere that has wifi and from many different devices, whether they be a computer, laptob, ipod, ipad, or iphone. One of the applications' that interested me the most is how it allows you to go to a webpage and manually add note boxes to the text, and then allows you to screen photo the webpage and store it into your library cloud.  With this feature you are able to take good notes from webpages you visited and then access it later without having to visit the original website, "Very useful if your the type of person who doen't remember all the webpages you visit." Diigo.com is good for a person who loves taking notes while they read text.  It helps the reader to be more interactive with the webpages, and helps them to understand them better because of the note taking availability.  I would definitely recommend this website to University of Guam students because they are constantly doing research papers and looking at online information.  
"SoundCloud.com 
SoundCloud.com is an amazing website that gives music lovers the opportunity to upload their songs and share them with friends, families, and other fellow musicians. The website allows listeners to comment on the different songs and beats they listen too, and gives them the chance to praise the artists for their music, or offer helpful advice on how to make it better.  I thought this was a trully genius idea, because it allows the artist and the listener to communicate with one another and therefore establish a closer relationship.  People who posts songs are also able to listen to a variety of different music styles, which therefore helps them to broaden there musical talents.