Storybird is a Web 2.0 tool used for creating attractive online storybooks. The site offers a lot of artwork by professional illustrators to serve as clip art for story creation. Storybird stands out to me among many other Web 2.0 storytelling tools simply because of the beautiful artwork users can choose from. I do a lot of lessons across K-6 classes on the elements that make up fiction. I think Storybird would be a great way for students to think about storytelling elements by making their own stories. Storybird offers student accounts, and teachers can create assignments, set due dates, and designate students to work collaboratively on assignments. I don't feel that teaching students to use Storybird would prove very difficult. Any students familiar with Powerpoint creation would probably be able to get started with minimal instruction.

Class Dojo is a Web 2.0 tool used for real-time classroom behavior management. Students can be given positive or negative points from a customizable list of behaviors. Although it is intended primarily to monitor behavior, I think it could be easily modified as a real-time assessment tool. Just change the behaviors list to a list of lesson goals, and then you can reward students points in real time for meeting specified lesson objectives. As an experiment, I loaded one of my 6th grade classes on my smartboard and started using Class Dojo with them without explaining what it was. It got their attention immediately as I started awarding points (stealthily via my Iphone) to students participating in our discussion. It had students that normally don't participate raising their hands to answer and receive a point! Class Dojo has student accounts where students are able to change their avatars and view their behavior reports. I have not used this feature with them, however. Since it is tool used by the teacher, there really isn't anything to train students to use...you should just explain to the class why you are using it, and perhaps set a reward system with them for receiving a set amount of points. Class Dojo is one of my favorite web 2.0 tools. It is best to see it in action, so here's a Youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5uihmPlbvA&feature=fvwrel

Popplet is a Web 2.0 tool used for mind-mapping. I think it would be a great visual tool to help my media students organize topics and subtopics for research assignments. It is very user-friendly...I think most of my students could dive right in to using it after a very brief tutorial.