Tool 5 - Web. 2.0 Products - ABCya! & Comic Strips

I've used Wordle for a couple of years now - it produces delightful results with minimal efforts.

This time I tried ABCya! which is even easier!   One of my favorite singers wrote this and I always find myself humming the chorus during boring meetings.


I also played around with Comix Strip Maker - very easy and lots of fun!  Many, many uses - explaining math procedures, in lieu of the traditional book reports, discussing the scientific process or as a lesson to reinforce punctuation.   I used the camera tool on my ActivBoard to "photograph" my strip, then I copied it, open PowerPoint and pasted it into a slide.  That converted the strip to a png. and I was able to save it to my desktop and upload it to my blog.

MixBook too - MixBook creates digital scrapbooks.  It's very involved and gives almost to many choices.  Great fun for adults, but sometimes to many choices overwhelms kids.  They spend so many time looking at all their options that they forgo content for the sake of appearance.  Glogster has an overload of choices too. We've somewhat been able to corral the creative child by specificing that their Glog must look historical or scienceticic.  Even a 10 year understands that Hello Kitty was not present at the Battle of the Alamo.