learning tools, collaboration, communicating

There are many great tools here to use with classes.  I have tried a few, and look forward to trying others.  One I use for communicating with students is Google Drive.  I am new to this, but have discovered the ease with which material can be sent to students by sharing it to their drive, including text, photos, videos, assignments, etc.  One way this could be used  in my general music classes is to share composer information quickly.  Anything from the composer's picture, biographical info, to videos of their music being performed can be shared.  I also plan to use it to share pictures of a composer's home that I have visited, to give the students a better picture of what their life was like.  I am also learning how to use Drive in conjunction with Hapara to send to entire classes at a time.  Still have a lot to learn, though!

I would also like to share how I just used Padlet in my classroom for collaboration.  Padlet was well-received by the kids, and they seemed to be really engaged in the activity.  We were doing a final review/sharing activity about George Gershwin.  I had them write down a certain number of facts about him and some of his compositions, and then they used this site to share, on the whiteboard, their facts with the class.  We then could go through and gather a whole list of info from their online stickies they'd posted.  They also had fun moving them around and adding their own selfies to their posts!  Lots of fun for them, so hopefully it made it a more meaningful experience.

To encourage creativity, I'd like to use Powtoon, since the students are getting a little tired of Powerpoint, etc.  It lets them add animation, music, etc, to their presentations.

For critical thinking, I think that Padlet, again, would be a great thing to use to get conversations about a topic started, because it can be used for lots of brainstorming activities.

I look forward to trying Delicious.com for my own computer at school, as well as with the students.  My bookmarks are a mess!  It sounds like an easy way to organize, instead of just scrolling down about a thousand different bookmarks.