Thing 13 - Sharing Your Vision

This is a YouTube video that provides an audio and visual interpretation of the poem that we read in Spanish 4, Oda al tomate by Pablo Neruda. I love this video; I hate that I can't access it from my school server because YouTube is blocked.

My real thrill with Thing 13 was how easy it was to embed the YouTube video using Slide. WOW! A simple copy of a wickedly long address and BAM! it was in my blog. YEAH! It worked like a dream and anything this easy and this useful surely has great potential in my classroom. The problem is that I still can't view this on my school site. UGHHH! I have found some gems on YouTube that would significantly enhance my classroom lessons but have so many limitations about accessing these during the school day. When I tried to view my blog through the school server, it said that I needed a plug-in to view my video clip and that I do not have permission to access the plug-in. Frustrating. On the upside, grandma who lives out of state will love accessing videos at one simple site.

I also made a slideshow using Empressr. I tried Empressr first because I was attracted to their self description as a storytelling tool and this seems like a perfect match for a Spanish language classroom. Making the slideshow was fairly simple even adding the photos right from their import options; I used Flickr. The master slide worked well but I didn't quite figure out how to make text be a part of the master formula. This is something to pursue. This was so much easier than what I have done in the past with PowerPoint which makes adding photos time consuming. I tried to add an audio clip but had no luck opening anything so this is another avenue to continue to practice. Overall, everything went very well with Empressr until I tried to embed it into this blog. I am working with 23 Things staff to resolve this hiccup. I look forward to using these in my classroom and these could be great visual prompts for students when they have to make their oral presentations. I have tried to eliminate "note cards" and instead require all visual prompts. This should be great especially if I fix my audio problem and they can record right onto their Empressr project. Hopefully, my Empressr slideshow will be up soon.

I liked what I saw on the Zoho site and noticed that many of the students in this class have used it. It offers more text, bubble, and clip art options than Empressr but I like the photo ease available with Empressr. Zoho looks like a useful tool and a definite step up from what I have done with PowerPoint. I did little with the 4th site Slideshare. The other 3 offered easier access to help/learn features and I found that Zoho, Empressr, and Slide met my needs for presentation programs.