My First Smackdown

I'd never seen a smackdown before, didn't know what to expect. When Steve Hargadon explained the concept, I actually thought to myself, "What if no one gets up?" Two minutes (or so) to share one little technology idea or trick. Rapid fire tech for an hour...I was in professional development heaven.
I'm going to share links for tricks that are applicable to an elementary classroom. Things that I will actually use when school starts.

#1 http://storybird.com A collaborative story writing tool. I had heard of this site from my PLN on twitter, but haven't used it. It's in beta right now and they are soon adding a print feature. I also belong to http://storybird.ning.com which covers writing with web 2.0 tools.

#2 Someone shared that in the wikispaces sandbox, the edit tools have been revamped. You can now copy & paste word documents w/o losing formatting. Now, I haven't made a wiki before, but I plan to build one for my classroom this year. I'm trying to decide whether a wiki suits my needs (I plan to use it for sharing what happens in the classroom w/parents) or if my google apps website will be sufficient. Any thoughts?

#3 http://goofram.com Combines a google search with a wolfram search. The example given was that it works best when comparing items. Like comparing Snickers and Baby Ruth. I need to figure out how to do a split screen. The presenter had a google search on one side of his screen and the goofram on the other.

#4 http://readability.com I had heard of this tool at a literacy conference I went to in February and just never got around to loading it. It is a plug-in that eliminates ads on web articles and enlarges the font. Great for having kids reading articles that may have inappropriate ads surrounding the text.

#5 Someone shared a wiki for the Springfield library. I didn't catch if this was Springfield, IL or where, but it had information about smart searching for both students and adults. I'll have to do some research and track this one down.

#6 http://express.smarttech.com I mostly would use this site because I can post Smart files on a wiki for kids to use. Since I just got a Smartboard in my classroom in December AND I'm going to try to go copyless on my homework this year, I think I'll use this frequently.

#7 http://sweetsearch.com and http://4mesweetsearch.com are two search engines that are friendly and appropriate for elementary kids. The 4 me search engine is appropriate for primary. I'm thinking that the primary site will be helpful for my 4th grade kids not reading at grade level.

#8 Someone shared the hint that if you don't put spaces between words, the words will stay together in sentences on Wordle. I'm wondering if that's true for http://tagxedo.com as well. Tagxedo is like Wordle, but you can make the word cloud into a specific shape. (Thinking of using this for U.S. state reports, using the tagxedo as their cover.)

#9 http://bingle.nu A search engine that gives you side-by-side results of Bing and Google search results. Also, http://google.com/squared for searching things that can be categorized, i.e., chocolate brands, felines, etc.

#10 http://edmodo.com A secure, social media site. I'm planning on setting up a classroom site with edmodo this year. I think it will be easier to send msgs to all students rather than using email.

I suppose I should have called this a "Top Ten" blogpost, but there were more that just these ten sites shared. These are the ones that I have added to my toolbox for my fourth graders and myself as our year together begins only 7 weeks from now!