Kick Start Activity 6 has been all about embedding media into blog post. Wow, what a great collection of sites are listed in this challenge. I have explored a couple and will definitely be checking out some more. One suggestion for a post was to review some of the tools so here are my thoughts on two of them.
Answer Garden
Answer Garden was so easy to work with. I like the simplicity of the site and had no trouble setting up my first garden. Another great feature is the way the answers are weighted – the more people who use a word or phrase the bigger it appears in the garden. This is a very neat visual trick. Having both the embed code and the link code for your garden means that you can add it to a blog or link to it from an intranet page or link to it from an e-mail and all of these may be ways of getting more of your class and extended community involved.
I can see myself using it to collect theme words, to explore spelling conventions, to add to discussions about parts of speech and for word challenges like the one below.
Add a word made from the letters in: Teacher Blogging Challenge… at AnswerGarden.ch.
WallWisher
Wallwisher is site I had used before particularly for an open ended maths challenge. I used the wall to post an answer to which my students were asked to give the mathematical question that may have produced this answer. Again I like the fact that you can embed or link to the wall. Wallwisher differs from Answer Garden as it allows users to add links and other media in the notes that are attached to the wall. It also differs as you are offered the opportunity to join the site and this gives you the ability to moderate more than one wall easily as they are gathered under your username.
Wallwisher could be used to collate ideas, create topic pages with links and sites, use it for spelling word observations, more maths challenges and collecting opinions on books read.
I did not have trouble using either site but the embed code was much easier to find in Answer Garden as it resides on the same page as the garden whereas in Wallwisher it is in one of the dropdown menus across the top.