Tool 5 Commentary

I have used Stupeflix in the past, but have had limited success getting students to use it. I think this is because of its similarity to PhotoStroy. I have pushed it over VoiceThread and Animoto becasue of the lack of a time limit. I like Animoto, but the free account is virtually worthless. For the $$ it is extremely limited for effectiveness in a classroom. I have long wanted to add Glogster to the classroom tool mix, but the cost was prohibitive. Since the district enabled its use, I have had fairly good results in having students use it for presentations. My students have used Glogs to supplement book report presentation/critiques for ELA and for Propaganda Posters for US History. It will see the most use of Glogster this coming year. I tried MixBook for this Tools assignment and I really think it holds great potential for student use in both of the applications mentioned above. I can also see using these tool to teach a lesson on application of a particular tool to a curricular item.
Last year, a colleague and I experimented with StoryBird and had a brief bit of fun with it. This year, I hope to revisit this tool in both the original story portion of the ELA curriculum and to recap a unit in US History. Although I didn't use it during this year's Poetry Unit, I can now see that it would have been a popular piece to our poetry project. The tools used in that project were primarily Google Presentations, PowerPoint, Prezi and Google Sites.