Gliffy!

Hi all!

I am looking into this new website Gliffy.com  and I am really excited about it.  I have used Inspiration software to make designs and flowcharts, but it costs too much money!  This would be awesome to use and it's free!!  This site may be considered dangerous.  It is addictive!  I love to use graphic organizers in my classroom.  Most of my students like them; the others just call me a treekiller because we use so much paper.  I have tried to make graphic organizers in Word and it is just too hard to do. 

Once I have an account with Gliffy it will let me save my diagrams online.  That will be awesome so I can work on diagrams at home, save them, and access to print them at school. 

We finished the Voicethread activity in class today.  I really see myself using this to put up images of the novel that we are reading or symbols, etc and having students respond to why these images are appropriate to the novel.  I also want to have my students to choose the images themselves.  I think that this would help their visualization techniques. This would also be a great community building tool.  Students can introduce themselves and tell a little about themselves. 

One worry that this does raise is approaches to censorship.  If the students are publishing something that is inappropriate, how do I prevent or police that?  Also, there are questions about access to technology and liability issues. 

Anyway, there will be another post later.