Menu for the Visually Intelligent

1. Photography

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Flickr: an amazing website that allows you to

• post your pictures online,
• create slideshows
• embed your slideshows on your blog, wiki, or other website
• tag your photos into "Flickr Sets" that will play slideshows of photos just with those tags (or everybody's photos with that tag)
• "hot-tag" sections of your photos with pop-up texts that appear when you move your mouse over different sections of the photos
• create groups - like your class members, family, or friends - and make slideshows of the group's photos
• and a million other things!
• the slideshow above is of all Flckr user photos collected as "favorites" by one user
• have students use the CREATIVE COMMONS section of Flickr for copyright free photographs;  different levels of use allowed.

Literacy Through Photography:

• At its core, Literacy Through Photography encourages children to explore their world as they photograph scenes from their own lives, and then to use their images as catalysts for verbal and written expression. Framed around four thematic explorations — self-portrait, community, family, and dreams — LTP provides children and teachers with the expressive and investigative tools of photography and writing for use in the classroom.

Creative Commons Search: find great non-copyrighted photographs by entering keywords here (get the Firefox search engine!).  Great for blogs, wikis, slideshows, and other products that can't violate copyright laws.

Pictobrowser:  This tool allows you to display a set of photos all at once on a blog or website from Flickr (instead up having just one of a set showing.)

2. Film-making and Digital Storytelling

• Jumpcut: upload video clips, share and edit them online - great for collaborative projects.
• VoiceThread: great for all ages: records voiceover on photos, allows for audio comment feedback - great privacy controls for younger grades.  (Check out the link for a great "Favorite Poems" project!)  It's as low-tech and user-friendly as they come.

3. Cartoon and Comic Strip Creators

• TooDoo:  Yes, you can use Comic Life on your MacBook, but ToonDo is a web-based comics creator with different options.  Here's an great example by Anthony Armstrong's grade 8 US History class!

• Voki: (suggested by Diane Cordell, New York): Voki is a single-frame comic creator that allows you to add voice recording to your character.  Examples: 

AC_Voki_Embed(300,400, '495b220c599c68385e935a521de95337', 13348, 1, '', 0);
Get a Voki now!

   

4. Visual Search Engines

From Patrick Higgins (New Jersey):  "Would love to contribute some visual search engines to that page. I played around with these with some Special Educations students a few weeks ago and they loved how they could see the search, rather than just read it. My faves:"

• Touch Graph:  visualization solutions reveal relationships between people, organizations, and ideas.
• Search Crystal:  lets you search and compare multiple engines in one place, and compare, remix and share results from the best web, image, video, blog, tagging, news engines, Flickr images or RSS feeds
• Clusty :  offers clustered results for a selection of searches.
• Kartoo::  represents search results in a series of interactive maps
• Quintura:  visualization becomes the center of user experience replacing antiquated listings
• # Quintura for Kids:  the first VISUAL search engine for the youngest web users.  Quintura helps to find kids-related information on the Web easily and interactively.

• Grokker   another visual search tool that makes "sets" (thanks to Carolyn Foote, Austin, TX, USA)

• Wiki Mind Map: a great tool for visual learners using Wikipedia or other wikis. Image (right) is the graphic result on my search for "Friedrich Nietzsche" on Wikpedia. See how each result is linked to the corresponding page, and how conceptually organized this visual is?

   

Skitch

4.  VoiceThread  -- Digital storytelling

VoiceThread--allow students to show something visually, while narrating it aloud.   A couple of examples--One Busy Day, One Mini Legends (elementary story from Australian teacher Alan Upton told like "Choose your Own Adventure" novels)  More examples of students using VoiceThread for storytelling and projects.

5. Visual Thesaurus

(by Chris Watson, Honolulu)

Visual Thesaurus is a pay site well worth the money. Our school has a site license so the whole community can take advantage of it. For teachers, there are language arts related blogs and forums, as well as current research and research-based practices. For students, the tool works like a thesaurus and/or dictionary, except it uses dynamic animation to organize words by definitions, word type, usage, amongst many other features. Besides the more obvious uses of this tool, like as a resource scaffold reading and enhance writing, it provides other ways to engage students with the power of words and language. For example, in my class we discuss the acquisition of vocabulary and the usage of language in certain contexts, then we started a VT search with "favorite" words and allowed ourselves to move into a word web with which we were totally unfamiliar=language is fun, creative, flexible, unique. In short, it livens up the skills of working with the connotations and denotations of words. Check out the screenshot, which is static and doesn't do VT justice.