Poetic License

I will readily admit that I can’t keep up with the news. Checking the RSS feed every other day is daunting, but I’m managing occasionally.  I really like the feeds I’m getting from YA “know-it-alls”  like Terri Lesesne who keep recommending wonderful literature. I’m also enjoying reading Laurie Halse Anderson’s Blog, Mad Woman in the Forest, to keep up with what she’s doing personally and professionally. Having personal connections (or so it seems since they come so frequently) helps with the professional motivation.

On a personal note, I like reading about new restaurants and am enjoying the posts in a feed I get called Table Talk by Meredith Ford. She reports on the Atlanta restaurant scene – something I don’t always have time to read about in the AJC.

So…I get sucked in easily. I love where the web leads but hate the productive time it sucks up in the vacuum of cyberspace.  Today I visited four new tools of choice. I’ll report on each individually-

1. Letter Pop is a website that allows one to create newsletters for free. There are hundreds of readily created templates available for use, and students would like this as an alternative to Publisher newsletters. Letter Pop is designed to be shared on-line, thus we waste less paper. I like this idea for group collaboration during writing workshops. I often have students wanting to do newsletters to distribute to their friends. This would be an easy way to do so and share with a lot of people. It’s also a neat tool for me to use to communicate with parents on a semi (am I being ambitious?) regular basis.
2. Mixbook is a website used for creating personal books.  It’s similar to I-Book that I’ve used a lot lately on the Mac. SnapFish and other picture storage sites on-line have their own versions. I like that Mixbook is a lot cheaper than I-Book, has a refundable guarantee, and presents more format choices. I think I’m going to try to use it for the next photo book I have to create. Grandparents are waiting for pictures from my children’s b’nai mitzvah in February still.  One of the neatest things about this website is that one can share the book on-line, for free. Way cool. Mixbook even allows users to interface with other uses to collaborate on a book.  I just went on vacation with four other families, and this would be a good way to collaborate on the vacation book.  Just gotta convince the others. Yes, there are loads of other classroom applications too…along the same lines.
3. Toondoo is a neat website too, especially for the creative types.  It’s a website where one can make their own cartoons, publish them to the toondoo website or embed into another interface like a blog, website or wiki.  I was particularly thinking of my English classroom boys who enjoy writing but also like the illustrative aspect of any piece of literature. They may not draw well, but Toondo solves this by having the available toon images at the ready.  This could be an independent Writing Workshop addition or a collaborative piece for any writing assignment. I originally wondered it Toondoo could help with creating a storyboard for a film project my students work on at the end of the year, and this is entirely possilble.
4. Weebly is a web-site creation space.  It’s free.  When I get a lot of time, I’m going to use it to help create a website for my jewelry business as it looks to be fairly foolproof.  When I visited the site, user organizations were featured, and one particularly caught my eye – it called Present Tense and is a “zionist-based” organization that gives feeder money to and support for entrepeneuraial start up companies (profit or not) who are based in Israel. I then went to look at the people benefiting from funding. One young woman started a business called “Challah for Hunger” which supports groups who want to raise money for charitable groups by making challah each week and selling it.  Neat!  I also found out about a young man’s project called “Bible Raps” – I’ll pass this along to the Judaic teachers.