Group items tagged

Myth and Legend Creator 2 shares a collection of traditional stories from England and around the world to hear and read. The site offers historical context for each story, story time lines and maps, ideas for use of the story in the classroom, and student work inspired by the story.  The Story Creator--with its libraries of backgrounds, characters, props, text bubbles, sound and video recording tools, and options to upload--provides students easy opportunities to create their own versions of traditional stories.

The Historic Tale Construction Kit is similar in that it helps students construct stories around a theme, in this case stories set in the middle ages with movable, scalable beasts, folks, braves, buildings. and old-style text.

Tikatok is a platform devoted to kid book publishing at a variety of levels.  Children have the option of exploring a collection of interactive story templates called StorySparks prompts, personalizing an existing book with their own names in Books2Go, with their own names, or starting from scratch in Create Your Own Book. Tikatok’s Classroom Program allows teachers to share lesson plans, view and edit students' work online, encourage collaboration, and track writing progress.

Big Universe is both an online library and a publishing and sharing community for grades K through 8.  Using Big Universe Author, students may create, research, and collaborate on books using a library of more than 7000 images and interactive tools.

Mr. Lanier’s book, which makes an impassioned case for “a digital humanism,” is only one of many recent volumes to take a hard but judicious look at some of the consequences of new technology and Web 2.0. Among them are several prescient books by Cass Sunstein, 55, which explore the effects of the Internet on public discourse; Farhad Manjoo’s “True Enough,” which examines how new technologies are promoting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact; “The Cult of the Amateur,” by Andrew Keen, which argues that Web 2.0 is creating a “digital forest of mediocrity” and substituting ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise; and Nicholas Carr’s book “The Shallows” (coming in June), which suggests that increased Internet use is rewiring our brains, impairing our ability to think deeply and creatively even as it improves our ability to multitask.

Steven Johnson, a founder of the online magazine Feed, for instance, wrote in an article in The Wall Street Journal last year that with the development of software for Amazon.com’s Kindle and other e-book readers that enable users to jump back and forth from other applications, he fears “one of the great joys of book reading — the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author’s ideas — will be compromised.” He continued, “We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.”

Bloom's digital taxonomy map

Bloom's Revised Taxonomy