A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. - Oscar Wilde
In previous blog entries, I’ve shared how I used Wikispaces in conjunction with literature circles with my sixth grade students ) as well as how we used a Wikispace as a portfolio for a writing assignment. (see student produced J. Peterman Collection) In my first year attempting to work with Wikis, I was very pleased with how my colleague and I combined English Language Arts activities with Web 2.0 tools.
As educators, we are often challenged to celebrate the diversity and uniqueness of our students. This past year, my students embraced their wikprojects wholeheartedly, and I believe this was, in part, because we let them customize their space. The students were allowed to create appropriate home pages to reflect their own interests and personalities, however, they had to also create an ELA page to use for their literature responses.
Student examples: (click on their home page to TRULY see their personalities!)
Kelsey's Page
Emily's page
Brianna's Page
Jared's Page
Emily's Page
Looking to celebrate the unique temperaments of your students? Here are some fun, free, appropriate decorating tools that can be shared with students and used to customize a blog or wikispace.
Fancy Text, Fonts and Headings
http://www.cooltext.com
Hundreds of different fonts, sizes and shapes to choose from. Customize your heading and save the file as a .png, .jpg or other image file to be placed on your site.
http://www.glogster.com
Create and customize and entire unique poster to use on your site. Embed links into the poster.
http://www.glitteryourway.com
More fancy, animated, glittery text.
Widgets and Other Interactive Items
http://www.poodwaddle.com/free.htm
Includes clocks, calculators, calendars and other widgets
http://www.clocklink.com
Many cool interesting clocks
http://widgets.bestmoodle.net/scripts/onthisday.htm
This automatically updates with information on what happened on the current date.
http://widgets.bestmoodle.net
Includes a bumper sticker widget along with MANY other great choices.
http://www.widgetbox.com
Choose from a gallery of widgets, or for the TRULY clever, create your own!
http://www.voki.com/
This clever site creates a talking character. You can design yourself or just about any other type of character that you can imagine. You can also phone in and record your voice to make the voki talk!!
http://www.toondoo.com/
Create a customized multi-panel cartoon.
Free Clipart and Animations
http://classroomclipart.com/
Nice, free appropriate clipart images
http://www.teacherfiles.com/free_word_art.htm
Create your own heading like the one at the top of this page!
http://www.imagechef.com/ic/banner/
Create an ANIMATED title for your wikispace
http://school.discoveryeducation.com/clipart/
Great clipart - some animations
http://www.school-clip-art.com/border_clipart.shtml
More school related clipart
http://www.imagechef.com
Customize images like this one and embed the html code!!
Avatars
Create a character: http://www.toondoo.com/Traitr.do
Customize a cartoon character and place the picture on your site.
http://www.doppelme.com/
Create a cartoon avatar character that can be placed as an image on your site.
http://illustmaker.abi-station.com/index_en.shtml
More choices for cartoon avatars that you can create.
