Pinterest

I can see why this site is so popular! You can browse through millions of photographs that people have posted, and sorted, into loose themes. You can find pictures of everything, animals, boats, cars, planes, mountains, bridges etc.

The downsides would seem to be many:

• It is very easy to waste hours looking at photographs
• Getting distracted is surprisingly simple (you start off with one subject and another leads you away)
• There is a definite problem with images not suitable for college (i.e. pornography)

I surfed for less than an hour and saw images of naked, and semi naked, men and women that should be censored, or the user warned about.

Because of this I do not feel that it a suitable site for the students to use in college.

Prezi

I skipped this chapter of the 21 Things as I have already spent a lot of time using this application.

It is an exciting and dynamic way of presenting information to an audience, be it a class of students or to  parents of prospective students at an Open Evening. There are positively hundreds of uses that it can be put to and because of its 3 dimensional movements it attracts attention even in busy places.

Like it's predecessor Power Point it presents information in 'Slides' or 'Frames' that then move around a screen. Stories can be told in a logical format and as well as text, images and movies can be embedded into it.

An added feature of Prezi is the ability to 'Explore' presentations that have been created by other people. You can make a copy of these and reuse them, adapting them to suit your own needs. Many have been created by students around the world, so sometimes they have a different slant on a subject to our own, but one thing they all have in common are grammar and spelling mistakes!

All in all an enjoyable and useful site

Twitter

Twitter is one of the most popular Social Networking sites around today, after Facebook. One Tweet can contain up to 140 characters, so is very short.

My impression of the site is that it is like reading in staccato, with trivial information displayed in very short bursts. I found that I would be easily distracted and follow links, eventually wasting much valuable time on fruitless searches! I do not see it as being much use in an academic setting, and can see students doing as I did, and becoming led on wild goose chases after information that is not relevant to the task in hand....

Poll Everywhere

Hey, this is great. You can create a poll and publish it on your Blog. People can then vote using a variety of devices, including their Mobile Phones, Tablets, Laptops and their PC's.

Here is the quiz that Jessie and I designed for the Moodle sessions, converted into a Poll.

I imported all these questions from a Word Document - easy peasy once I got the hang of it.

Heather helped me as I couldn't figure out how to embed the poll into Blogger, but that is easy too, once you know how!

Padlet

Is an online notice board. Imagine virtual post-it notes, and you are close to what this program does.

It could be useful with a group of students where they could all post a note onto the wall at the start of a class, and then discuss further their ideas.

Here is an example of how it might be used by two people who are packing for a long trip where each can record what they have done, and what they each feel remains to be dealt with.

Created with Padlet

As you can see Will is using the wall to post questions as he thinks about them, so that either he, or John, can consider them and then answer at a later date.

willatcollege's photostream

willatcollege's photostream on Flickr.

willatcollege's photostream

willatcollege's photostream on Flickr.