Websites

Bookopolis

Bookopolis is a website for students (and teachers and parents) to use for book recommendations, tracking reading, creating a list of books to read, and connecting with friends. Students can create an account to look for new books to read. They can search for books by topic, grade level, award winners, etc. Books can be rated and/or reviewed by other students. Parents need to approve the account and anyone who they want to have as friends. Students can also keep a reading log online. I plan on trying this with my class this year. I regularly have students who lose their monthly reading logs and this would provide another avenue for them to keep track of what they read. It would be something I can show to the parents during Back to School Night. 

FlipQuiz

The FlipQuiz website allows you to create game boards for review or a specific activity. The boards are a nice interactive Jeopardy format and the questions and answers (if you choose) are shown on the screen. This would be a great way to review a specific unit or topic. I could see using this as a librarian or a classroom teacher. I used to have a Jeopardy board I created with poster board, Velcro, and markers. However, that has gone missing and it was limited in the number of questions and topics I could include. FlipQuiz looks like it has many more options and then I could save the boards for re-use with other classes and in the future. I've also tried to use PowerPoint templates, but this appears to be much easier to work with.

Storyboard That

Storyboard That looks like a fun website. Students can use it to create their own stories and comics. They can add the background and then add the characters and the text. They can also create a web diagram or other layout if they don’t want the traditional layout of one pane after another. There is also an app available for iPads. A librarian or classroom teacher could use this to have students create stories about their lives or demonstrate something they’ve learned. I could see incorporating it into our biography project in 2^nd grade. Instead of asking students to create a person, they could create a story demonstrating the important things they’ve learned about that person’s life. We could also use it to illustrate the different character building blocks we talk about at the beginning of the year.