Animoto

We used Animoto the other day. It was a pretty cool picture presentation tool. Very fun and easy to use and make. I will DEFINITELY be using this tool again in the future. Leaves a lot of room for creativity. I really liked how you were able to put music in the background. VERY COOL TOOL!!!

I posted my animoto here on my blog. It's about one of my most loved passions....football! :)

Skype Visits

So far our PLN class has skyped in with some pretty awesome people. We've talked with Will Younker from Juxio, Maggie Tsai from Diigo, Kimmy Chann from Symbaloo, Tom Whitby, and our fellow PLN classes from CAM and Philly.
Talkin with the creators of the web tools is one of the coolest things we've done in our class. When you talk with these people you really get to know the web sites much much better. What better way to learn all the nooks and crannies of these great sites then to talk with the creators themselves. This has really changed the way I've used these tools and really helps me learn all of the tools and instruments each site has to offer so I can put it to its full usage. Very cool.

Talking with all of these people also helps me get a much better grasp on what a PLN means to different people and how they can be useful to yourself. Being able to connect to people from all around the world is a pretty powerful tool.

Juxio

Juxio was a pretty fun tool to put together both pics and words into an easy to use slideshow. I really liked its setup to creatively organize the events and pics into whichever way you want. It was very easy to use and the tool tray was pretty simple. Some things I didn't enjoy were that there was no music you could put as a background. It would make the presentation much more enjoyable for viewers if this were an option. I would also like it if I could control the speed of the slideshow, rather than just the one slow pace it has now. With a few more advancements, this could be a very popular and favorable tool of mine. I would definitely consider using this web tool again. This is just a small Juxio I threw together for my PLN class discussing a few of my passions.

Our PLN class also got the opportunity to skype in with Will Younker, one of the creators of Juxio. It was a very cool chance to talk with him and let him know our ideas and experience with Juxio. I think we gave him some pretty good insight on what we thought about his site. Not often does a group of high schoolers get the opportunity to talk to the creator of a web site and tell him our opinions and advice. Pretty awesome. 

My PLN Journey...What this means to me

This past few weeks I've been doing a lot of work on expanding and putting to use my PLN and thinking about what it does for me. I'm still trying to grasp the whole concept of an educational use of twitter or other social networking tools. Hopefully over the next couple of weeks I can start to put fourth a better effort to make it a better learning tool. I'm more use to the whole routine of googling the subject and just researching it on my own. So we'll see how it goes. B-)