Scrapblog (online resource)
May 12, 2007 by Paul Hamilton
Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.
Today’s featured resource is elegant in its simplicity, while offering limitless potential. As I see it, Scrapblog is yet another UDL tool that should be in every teacher’s tool kit.
Scrapblog (online resource) This is an online multi-media authoring platform for creatively organizing, presenting and sharing digital media. You can combine photos, audio, video and text in almost any way imaginable. For a fairly thorough overview of Scrapblog, it’s worth taking the Quick Tour that is available on the home page.
Scrapblog offers students a creative way to present and share what they learn. It also gives teachers a quick and convenient way of presenting material digitally, with tremendous potential for engaging students. Here’s an example of an audio-visual Scrapblog on the life and work of ee cummings. (To hear the audio, be sure to allow the entire Scrapblog to download before playing it, and remember that you can pause it whenever it goes too fast for you to read all the text on a page.) Of course, there is also the autobiographical option of using Scrapblog for personal audio-visual blogging.
The intuitive user interface of Scrapblog allows you to be as creative as you wish. You can use one of numerous available themes, or you can create your own pages completely from scratch. For example, backgrounds, borders, frames and callouts are a snap to add and customize. It is also easy to add music and/or narration to a Scrapblog.
The “Scrapblog Builder” offers the user an amazing range of options, and it couldn’t be easier to use. Photos and videos are simply dragged and dropped on a page. Once on the page, images can be resized and positioned as desired. For photos, there is even the opportunity to do basic photo-edits right on the page. Click to enlarge the screenshot below of the Scrapblog Builder. (Use your browser’s back button to return to this page.)
Each Scrapblog is assigned a unique URL that can either have restricted access or be available to the public. A Scrapblog may consist of as many pages as you wish, and objects on a page can be linked to other pages in the Scrapblog. As an added bonus, Scrapblogs can also be printed. This gives you the ability to use Scrapblog to create books, cards and DVD’s.
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Paul,
I, too, have been interested in using Scraplogs with my English Language Learner students. However, I couldn’t figure out how they could use photos they could find through, for example, Google Image search or Flickr Creative Commons search.
It seemed to me that you could only use your own personal photos.
However, in seeing your EE Cummings examples, obviously those photos were accessed somehow.
Did you make that slideshow and, if so, how did you use those photos?
Thanks.