Some New Year's Learning Fun...

I'm going to start the year off on a light note...

As a student, I was never one to voluntarily speak up in class and oral reports were a huge source of stress for me. In college I was required to take a public speaking course and all my speeches were recorded and to this day, I cannot watch them. Even now, speaking to a group of students does not bother me but a group of adults gives me butterflies in my stomach for days beforehand.

Knowing there are students like me in my classes, I find myself drawn towards finding activities for students to replace the stand-in-front-of-the-class-and-talk speech on topics they have researched. Of course PowerPoint and presentation software are great tools and now free movie making software is available but sometimes I just want something that is a bit more on the lighthearted side... where you might laugh the first time you see it but then you want to listen to it again.

Here is one of those sites (middle school teachers if this looks familiar it is because I shared it last year via email): http://blabberize.com/.

I found the opening video funny though I do want to warn you that it includes a conversation about peeing in one’s pants in case you are in a room full of students taking a test or something at the moment. While this site certainly was not designed exclusively for the academic world, there are definitely ways to use its features in a classroom setting.

For example, here is a clip I made with a picture and information about Susan B. Anthony (the opposite extreme from the intro. video; I went serious) ~ it took only a few minutes to create:

If you don't have a place to embed your video, that is okay. Blabberize will give you a link to share with everyone. You can see the above one here.

What a fun way to make a famous person in history share information about his or her self, or to have a character in a book talk about the conflict in his or her life, or to give a small group of students at a station directions on an assignment while you are working with other students.

Here is a link to a blog entry about Blabberize that describes several ways to use it in an academic setting: http://blog.learningtoday.com/blog/bid/27337/Blab-On-Interactive-Classroom-Tool?source=Blog_Email_[Blab+On!+–+Interacti]

Have fun! Happy New Year!