How to Spice Up Our Individual Blogs

Ms. Lirenman has noticed that some of us have added pictures, videos, and drawing to our individual blogs.   If we have internet access (which we do since we're reading this blog post) then we can explore a lot of web based tools.  Many web based tools allow us to  create something  and add it to our blog. This process is called embedding.

If you haven't noticed there is an avatar at the top right hand side of the screen. This avatar was made using the tool Voki.  Click the green word and it will take you directly to the website.  We used Vokis with our big buddies.  They are a fun way to share ideas.  Vokis can easily be added to our individual blogs by getting the embedding code and adding it to the html screen on our individual blogs.

Kerpoof is another great website to create personal cards and posters with.  We can easily add our Kerpoof creations to our blogs.

Audio Boo is a simple recording website that allows us to record our reading then have a little playback machine to listen to our recording.  Ms. Lirenman is really eager to teach us how to use this tool so that we can read to it and listen to how we sound reading.

Wordle is a great way for us to show you what we know about a topic.  For example when we start to study fairy tales we'll be able to type in all the words we know about fairy tales.  Wordle then takes what we typed and makes a word picture with our words.  It's a very cool tool and one that Ms. Lirenman would like us to use more in the new year.  Here is Ms. Lirenman's sample school holiday wordle.

For most (if not all) of these websites we don't need to be a member to use them.  In some cases we will not be able to save anything we've made on their website but we can get the embedding code and embed what we've created onto our individual blogs.  If all this sounds way too confusing  not to worry Ms. Lirenman will show us how to do it and she will happily show any parents that would like to learn too.  Perhaps during one community read she'll take the time to show everyone.  By adding things like Vokis, Wordle, Kerpoofs, and Audio Boos we will be making our blogs even more enticing to our global audience.