Web 2.0 tools and High School English

Last week my colleague, Jim Fitzgerald, and I, spent the day looking at different version of screencasts and how they can be implemented in the High School English Department at ISB.  Some of the tools we explored are: iMovie, Photostory, VoiceThread, Audacity, PowerPoint, and Smart Notebook.  Each tool had specific tasks we thought could be useful in specific areas of our English department. 

For example:

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  iMovie is perfect for creating tutorials for ePortfolios and for introducing students to PantherNET.
  
  
  
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  PhotoStory can be used to record narration for pictures with background music for Creative Writing during the Short Story Unit.
  
  
  
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  VoiceThread can be used to have students annotate a given passage from a play or a poem.  As each student annotates the piece, students are given opportunities to see how their fellow students are reading and seeing a passage to enable them to draw connections they may not have been able to see before (see my example here)
  
  
  
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  Audacity can be used during formal oral commentaries for IB students.
  
  
  
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  Power Point is self explainable, but thanks to lessons and readings from Presentation Zen, by Garr Reynolds, our Power Point presentations at Open House this year were a million times better than previous years.
  
  
  
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  Smart Notebook allows educators to take our annotations from class and paste them on PantherNET to allow students to listen to the discussion in class and have the annotations available at home.
  
  
  

Obviously this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to ways to use technology when teaching HS English, but you can find a summary of our work here: http://www.coetail.asia/page/Dana+%26+Jim+Tool+Matrix along with video tutorials for each tool.