Brandon SandĂ Castro Faculty of Social Sciences Universidad Latina Costa Rica Monday April 10th, 2017 Teacher: Maria Catalina CortĂŠs Aplicaciones Computacionales.
Aplicatio ns seen and used in class:
StoryBird: Online storytelling platform that allows students to create their own virtual stories. Works by providing users with illustrations by artist that can be used to create captivating stories.
Personal Opinion: In this case storybird for me is a great tool to create your own stories using images already established. Before using this app, I did not know that it actually existed and also at the time of learning how to use it, the experience was awesome, because actually this app is really cool and easy to handle which I consider that is extremely useful even more when you work with kids, so starting from this point, you as a teacher do not have to always monitoring your students because for sure they will immediately learn how to manipulate the program and create the story easy and quick but for sure it is funny an entertained. I really liked
this app, because you can choose either create a new story or extract any short story from internet and try to adapt it.
Evernote: It is used for note-taking and organizing information. This application Was founded in California by Stephan Pachikov. Evernote supports the majority of PC models and popular devices. Evernote is a web-based app that allows end users to capture, store and synchronize text, image and video files across multiple computing devices.
Personal Opinion: Evernote is another great application that allows you to create quick notes whenever you want or whenever you need it. And also for sure this is really helpful when for example you are reading a newspaper or some important information about any fact, and you decided to create notes because you would use them to do any activity after some time. So in my personal opinion I believe this application helps you to make quick notes just to make sure that you do not forget that great idea that came to your mind. But also this is great to write in a attractive and innovative way
Wikispaces: Built with Wikispaces, the Immersion Curriculum Map provides all participating schools with a series of wikis containing learning materials and an academic roadmap for each grade level and subject. Wikispaces Classroom is a social writing platform for education. We make it incredibly easy to create a classroom workspace where you and your students can communicate and work on writing projects alone or in teams.
Personal Opinion: I consider the creation of “wikis� very difficult, starting from choosing a topic then create the entire page for me was very hard. Because probably in order to manipulate this you must have to watch a big explanation about how to handle it, because there are many facts that need to be used with right knowledge and by the way you are accustomed to use simple tools related to Microsoft word and other ones, but for sure they are not the same you must knowhow to accommodate all the information and also create a very attractive page for the information that will be posted by you on that specific site, because for sure if the page does seem attractive no one is going to visit it and support it.
Edmodo:
Personal Opinion: Edmodo looks like Facebook; this application is another one that really caught my attention first of all because of the easy way of handle it. This application is very similar to Facebook in terms of web structure, but the difference is that in here there is no chance of share photos or any “silly� things like memes or false information. Here what a teacher can do is just upload documents, or sharing info with the students and the interesting part is that in the webpage the students can interact with the classmates by asking questions or making comments in the spaces designated. This actually is a very cool tool that in the future for sure I will try t implement with my students just to see how it would work. The only problem is erase all the spam shared to your email.
Cmaptools:
Personal Opinion: C-map tools, is a nice application for those who like to create mind maps and the people who learn more by summarizing a text and then try to incorporate it to a mind map. But in my case I do believe the mind maps work a lot to remember information about certain topic, but sometimes take a lot of time to create one of them and in this case with C-map tools first you need to download the program to your computer and then install it, once this is done then you can open the app and start creating your awesome mind map, but at the time of doing it I felt a little confused because there are many things that need to be discovered in this program in order to make our work look wonderful. And in my case I would d try to use but only knowing that my students have computer and everybody is in the same place, otherwise it would work. This is an app that need to be used in groups and everybody together just to evaluate the process.
Podcast and Vodcast:
Personal Opinion: In this case I really did not get the point of podcast and vodcast, I could not understand them at all. But in my opinion I do not believe that can be used with students, because these applications require a lot of time just to learn how to apply it to our classes and then get the attention of the students to focus in listening long audios.
JClic:
Is formed by a set of computer applications that are used for carrying out different types of educational activities: puzzles, associations, text exercises, crosswords‌The activities are not usually used alone, but packed in projects. A project is formed by a set of activities and one or more sequences, which indicate the order in which they have to be shown.
Personal Opinion: J-clic for sure is one of those very interactive applications that allow the users to first create a game and after try it. This app is one of the favorites because is really cool and really easy to control, in here we can not only create one kind of game there different ones that can fit with the type of material you are looking for. In this case the app needs to be downloaded and after installed but is interesting to create material for your teaching major.
Google Sites: Google Sites is a free and easy way to create and share webpages.
Personal Opinion: This application does not call my attention that much, because I do not like to create webpages and by the way I am not really good at doing it. Of course this application plays a nice role in education because starting from here you as a teacher is able to create a page in which your students can learn or extract information which is at the same time beneficial for them. I am not saying that the webpage does not work, of course it is crucial to share information and make people learn and upload material, but the problem is that it requires a lot of time and also people who have the maturity to handle it and do not get bored.
Edpuzzle:
Personal Opinion: Edpuzzle more than an app is a tool that really will help to modify videos already created, this is very nice for example when you need to explain a topic because for sure showing a video in which you explain every part of it helps a lot to your students understands a topic. This I believe will benefit the teacher because it will make the explanations easy to the teacher and the students. With EDpuzzle you can now crop any YouTube, Khan Academy, Learn Zillion, Vimeo or other video, insert your own audio notes, narrate over the video, and best of all insert questions at any point in the video to create quizzes multiple choice or short answer quizzes.
Powtoon: Powtoons is a online tool that may let students and teachers to make animated presentations. Students can use it for create short and as well sustained research in based question. Demonstrating understanding of the topic by using technology for publishing information that may help others develop a good organization and style of presentations for the audience.
Personal Opinion: Powtoons is a nice application to create animated videos that will help a person to explain certain topic instead of giving a long explanation in which the audience will be bored. But I would try to look for a different one because the problem with this app is that if you want to make your video look awesome you need to pay for it monthly, I mean for using certain characters and stuff that belongs to the page, but at the end powtoon is really nice to make videos and is not very difficult to handle. But if you are a person who is really into creating awesome videos go ahead and pay and let your imagination fly.
Zunal.com:
Is a web-based software for creating webpages in a short time without the use of HTML codes. It was launched in 2001 it is free and let the teacher and any person to share information.
Personal Opinion: Zunal is very nice webpage to upload information about certain topic, I really like it because it is a site in which you can add as many information as you wish using images and videos, but in this case the tool is extremely easy to manipulate and by the way it also allows you to share that information with yours friends or partners and even students and the best is that it looks like a webpage or a wiki.