Tuesday, June 5, 2007

Week 3 - Thing 6

Fun stuff. I started out looking at some of the mashups and found myself a couple of hours later still exploring. I like the movie poster, trading cards and magazine covers. All of them certainly have curriculum connections that can extend to just about any subject. My only concern would be that students might become more engaged with the technology than the actual content (much as I did while exploring the site). Because of this, I think it would be important to provide a fair amount of structure, especially to younger students when using this for projects.

I also explored the trip planner mashup with high hopes. Unfortunately, the site doesn't yet have enough users to make it too valuable. My hope was that there would be detailed trip routes and journals for trips. However, I mostly found skeleton trips that appeared to have been created by people like me who were just trying it out. I also couldn't find a way to delete what I had created which seems like a drawback. However, since these are user developed solutions, it makes sense that they might not have all the bells and whistles that professional applications might have.

I got a notice in the mail recently that Frommer's travel website is creating a Flickr group so maybe that will develop into a robust travel site.

A fun exercise.

1 comment:

IrmaPince said...

This was definitely the place where I spent the most time playing with all the fun tools. Hopefully you will post some of your curriculum ideas on our wiki. (http://calcurriculum.pbwiki.com/)