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Movie Maker allows users to turn home movies into feature films of sorts. The user has the ability to add a soundtrack, narration, text, and other graphics to their home movies. This is an effective tool to use for digital storytelling because users have access to turn their words into so much more.

Inspiration is an excelled software program that helps you create graphic organizers. I like this program more than the others because it allows the user to save the file as a PDF or JPEG file. Many of the other resources do not allow for specialized saving.

This website, although is the advertising for the software, has an area for teachers to sign-in. This access has training and tutorials for teachers on how to use the software and how to integrate it into the curriculum. The site provides lesson plans and ideas for teachers as well as a forum and technical support. These programs are concept-mapping or brain-storming programs designed to help students of all ages prepare and organize their thoughts for writing. The program provides both text and visual elements to assist the learner. Purchase of the software is a condition of access to the teacher support and training areas.

This website, although is the advertising for the software, has an area for teachers to sign-in. This access has training and tutorials for teachers on how to use the software and how to integrate it into the curriculum. The site provides lesson plans and ideas for teachers as well as a forum and technical support. These programs are concept-mapping or brain-storming programs designed to help students of all ages prepare and organize their thoughts for writing. The program provides both text and visual elements to assist the learner. Purchase of the software is a condition of access to the teacher support and training areas.

The classroom is a dynamic environment with a huge variety of opportunities for showcasing what has been learned in professional development. Sure, writing a lesson plan or a reflection may indicate how well the participant has benefited from PD course material, but to gain an authentic look into what the students are now capable of doing as a result of the teacher's professional development a web 2.0 tool may be more appropriate. An authentic assessment option is the glog. The glog is a way for educators to share what the students have learned and how the objectives from a PD course have been integrated into daily instruction. Plus, students love the multimedia interface and easy to use tools.

Teachers, improve the future with a new way of teaching! Glogster EDU is a collaborative online learning platform for teachers and students to express their creativity, knowledge, ideas and skills in the classroom. This is an education-safe online environment where teachers can add classes to assign projects using Glogster. Students can use this multimedia tool to explore presentations previously made on a variety of subjects and topics, as well as creating their own glogs.

Glogster allows learners to create an interactive poster, in which they post images, text, music and videos. They can also include links to other websites, including other glogs, to make their project more comprehensive. When used to create a project, this is a deeply learner-centered technology, as it requires a great deal of both behavioral and cognitive activity. Viewing it as part of the workshop will require both kinds of activity as well.

Power point template for assertion and graphics "Rethinking the Design of Presentation Slides: The Assertion-Evidence Structure"

Because I feel that this website that could develop my ideas to for a workshop with a step-by-step guide to brainstorming creative exercises utilizing a facilitator with a group collaboration encouraging ideas to be written with creative exercises.

Glogster EDU www.glogster.com The first authentic assessment activity website that I chose is called Glogster EDU. Glogster EDU is a website like no other resource I have ever seen. Glogster EDU is a creative, dynamic and innovative digital outlet for online creations that keeps learners in engaged in course content, and makes teaching and learning more fun (Glogster EDU, 2009). Glogster EDU is a vibrant, multi-sensory learning experience which integrates learner's knowledge and skills into traditionally text-oriented subjects and motivates learner's desire to explore topics in which they may previously have been less interested (Glogster EDU, 2009). The reason I chose Glogster EDU as one of my authentic assessment activities is because I have used it in my classroom and it works great. Glogster EDU is a powerful resource to use with students of the middle and high school levels because its possibilities are controlled by the students knowledge and creativity. Educators can set up assessments easily and quickly using the resources provided by the site host. Glogster EDU can be used for any type of assessment where students need to illustrate their understanding of course content. Glogster EDU also provides its own video site called Schooltube where students can research, watch, and add video to their personal glog adding the much needed audiovisual aspect to projects that normally would have been text based. I also really like the fact that Glogster EDU is a private site monitored by teachers; it gives me a sense of assurance that my students won't be accessing information that could get them or me in trouble.

Glogster allows users to create digital posters that incorporate video, text, pictures, and sound.

Glogster (www.glogster.com) allows teachers and students to create interactive projects. Teachers can design interactive glogs for their students to complete or assign the students to create their own glog for a class project. Either way this allows for the teacher to really control the learning. Mayer (2009) would consider Glogster knowledge construction because students will have to view the videos, read the articles, and examine the pictures that the teacher embeds in their glog to form an opinion or to create their own glog. When a student creates their own glog no two will be exactly the same.

Online quiz making tool. Well-suited to assessing essential learning. Explanation of choice: Free and, unlike others I found, was selected for ISTEs 101 Best web sites 2005-2006.

This site allows users to create online quizzes and organize results. This site is effective, because it allows the user to create questions that have multimedia files attached instead of just basic questions with no graphics or videos. Students can also review quizzes and see what the correct answers were if they missed any questions. The site also guides the user through any possible dilemmas by providing a page of FAQ's and a link to contact the QuizStar support team.

Quizstar is an online assessment tool. Instructors can create quizzes online for their students to take. Quizzes can be made in many languages. Quizstar allows multimedia attachment to quizzes.

Posted by: Jean Haefner: Site: Michael's Photography School This site contains multiple lessons from beginner, through advanced. The intermediate links provide video, graphics, and text to support the lesson, with assignments to download and additional links to extend learning. The link provided here is a lesson on depth of field, and provides both generative and essential learning.

Posted by: Jean Haefner: Site: CAST This site provides generative learning, as well as facilitating it via its application. The text and visual definitions are provided in a logical sequential manner, then offering suggestions for utilizing the various types of organizers. This went beyond many of the other sites I found.

Bubbl.us is a simple and free web application that lets you brainstorm online. Users can create colorful mind maps, share with others, export the mind map to a blog or website, email or print and save it as a jpg. It has a very simple interface and a good help tool in the bar on the right. If Spinscape seems daunting and you don't need all the additional collaborative functions, this is a better choice for the novice.

This is a great site for you to create your own brainstorm. You need to create an account if you want to save these. They can be as big as you want. They do not print well because they tend to get large.\nThis would be a great tool for you to use to keep track of all of the things that you would like to have in your community design!!

This website is good for creating graphic organizers in a highly structured way for people who are less technologically savvy. It basically walks through step by step how to create basic organizers and gives you some power to rearrange them. It is better than a lot of online organizers in that you don't have to possess a great deal of skill to use it.

Cool Text.com is a free graphics generator for web pages and anywhere else you need an impressive logo without a lot of design work

This is an overview of setting up a blog. THis uses many graphics for examples.

Brief description of what it allows you to do and how it can be used for essential or generative learning: This site is intended more for the business purpose of mindmaps and flowcharts so the created products are more professional looking. Once again free to any user, this site allows easy sharing and collaborating. Audience members can easily create a mindmap that reflects the knowledge they are gaining or shared easily by the presenter. Brief explanation of why you found this site to be better than others you found (e.g., more effective, creates better products, easier to use, and so on): I prefer this site because of its professionalism and the fact that it is free.

The Center for Universal Design website of the College of Design of NC State University claims to be designed to promote accessible and universal design in housing, commercial and public facilities, outdoor environments, and products. Though, it's not about web design per se, covers nonetheless the essentials of what I want faculty to understand about Universal Design in creating their websites. The multimedia artifact on this page is picture and text but it is presented in a way that engages the learner. The headings are reasonably big and color coded. The images are relevant and positioned in a manner that facilitates learning without focusing the learner's attention too much on the graphics. I would say that this workshop is also learner-centered.

This website provides free technology tutorials as well as free lesson plans for teachers, parents, and anyone else who may be interested. The website provides step by step instructions complete with illustrations and graphics to assist the learner in utilizing specific computer programs or utilizing technology in lesson plans. The website is free to users and therefore does have advertising on it but the advertising is not overly obtrusive.