ZooBurst

For this week, the tool I selected was Zooburst. I selected this because I have always been interested in having students creating their own stories and books. This tool could be used to give the students a new way to represent the book that they read. Instead of merely having students summarize a book, they can retell the story in their own words. ZooBurst allows students to make a pop up book including pictures and audio recordings. For students who do not have small motor skills or cannot spell that well, they can speak their words into the story. This way, the teacher can be sure that students are recalling the story's key points regardless of a student's ability with written language. I would use this tool to have students summarize a book or as a lesson early in the school year where they can recap on what they did for the summer.

The site itself was not as smooth as I would like it. While it's great that the students can upload images, a larger database would be nice. Plus, the tool to browse the search engine was very convoluted. The site was very specific about which buttons to press to save the information and I'm not sure that younger students would be able to remember that pressing the red "x" meant the site would not save their information. You can find my example here.

As for the "Do you Know?" video, I did not find the facts as staggering as I would have a few years ago. For another class we watched a similar video from a few years earlier. Plus, as someone who works at an electronics store, the information about CDs and physical video games has been something we've been talking about for years.