Day+Four


 * Welcome to Day Four**
 * Yesterday** we
 * explored various interactive sites and blogged about them
 * finished our Wallwisher,
 * embedded a link to Wallwisher in our blogs
 * posted comments on each others walls
 * started a [|Prezi]
 * looked at [|Soundcloud]

First go back into your blog and edit the first post. For most of you this is called "Hello World". Tell us about yourself. This needs to be at least 100 words long. We will be using this for another assignment later on. For those of you who don't have a post called Hello World- make one.
 * Today**

Next begin working on New Media Literacies. Everyone needs to take time to add to the Prezi but we will do this one at a time. Once everyone is here we will also work on recording our song. We will be using an audio recording program called [|Audacity]. This is an excellent program and a free download off the internet. I will also be taking pictures of you today so that you can use this photo for various assignments.

A. New Media Literacies

Networking -- the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information. Writing something isn't enough without the ability to circulate it to the communities where it will matter.

In a world in which knowledge production is collective and communication occurs across an array of different media, the capacity to network emerges as a core social skill and cultural competency. A resourceful student is no longer one who personally possesses a wide palette of resources and information from which to choose, but rather, one who is able to successfully navigate an already abundant and continually changing world of information. Increasingly, students achieve this by tapping into a myriad of socially based search systems, including the fol- lowing popular sites.

• Google.com:At the core of the now ubiquitous Google search engine is an algorithm that analyzes the links between websites to measure which sites different website creators consider valuable or relevant to particular topics. • Amazon.com: Suggests books a customer may like on the basis of patterns gleaned from analyzing similar customers. • Movielens.org: Predicts if a particular user will like a given movie based on preferences from similar users. • Ebay.com: Creates a complex reputation system between users to establish trust for a given seller. • Epinions.com: Establishes reliability of a given product on the basis of previous consumer experiences • last.fm: Generates personalized radio stations on the basis of correlations between similar listeners’ music preferences. • Del.icio.us: Suggests relevant websites for a given term on the basis of other users’ book- marking habits • Answers.google.com: Offers a mass collective-intelligence marketplace in which users can offer money to anyone worldwide who may have answers to their questions.

Task

1. Go to google or another search engine and fine interactive websites for a topic that interests you. For example you could google interactive French language web-sites or interactive geography tools.

2. Go to the Interactive Web-Sites page on our wiki and post a link to one of the sites you have found.


 * B. Vokis**

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Task

Create a Voki and embed it in your blog. Once you have embedded it in your blog write a blog on how you might use this tool to aid student learning.

Go to [|Voki Home] and follow the instructions to create your own Voki, your own personal avatar. Embed your voki in your blog by clicking on the Wordpress widget on the left. Fill in your blog user name and password and it will embed the voki right into your blog.

To find helpful information on embedding in blogs check out the following web site =[|Kick Start Activity 6 – Beginner – Enhancing posts by embedding media]=

Here is the URL if you would like to copy and paste it in another window. []


 * If you are having trouble embedding your Voki** try the following instructions and see if it works.

Copy the embed code Click on **HTML Tab** on your blog post. Paste the **embed code** into your post where you want it to appear then immediately click Publish
 * Don’t click back to **Visual Tab** before hitting Publish as it can break the embed code.
 * Immediately close your post once you’ve published.
 * Change back to Visual Editing mode when you write your next post by clicking on the **Visual** tab.
 * You use this same process for any website that provides embed code.


 * C. Tagxedo**

Tagxedo is a word cloud generator. The image below is an example of a word cloud.

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It was created by taking some text on New Media Literacy. The larger the word the more frequently it appears in the text. It helps to point out the most important words in the text.

Go to Tagxedo and create your own word cloud. You will need to create some text or copy some text to put into your word cloud.

You can put a link from your word cloud to your blog or you can embed following the directions below-

// You can save it as an image map. Image map is clickable and only uses raw Html. // // (a) Choose "Save to Html Cloud (Experimental)". // // (b) Choose width / height. Use the (default) max option. For example, 450 max x 450 max. // // (c) Save the Jpg (tagxedo.jpg) // // (d) Upload the Jpg to Imgur.com, and note the "Direct Link" URL. // // (e) Save the Html (tagxedo.html) // (f) Edit the Html so that the src tag points to the "Direct Link" URL in (d). Take out the first two and last two lines (so that it starts with and ends with ). (g) Insert the modified Html to your blog in Html mode.