Recently, I discovered a vocabulary website called Membean.  The site offers personalized vocabulary lessons to help with preparation for the SAT, the GRE, or general vocabulary improvement for both individuals and schools.  The vocabulary lessons are visually stunning and very interactive; however, they are not free.  Personally, I know that my school simply cannot afford to pay for tailored vocabulary development for each student, but Membean's format has given me the idea of setting up a vocabulary wiki and having my students create their own interactive vocabulary pages, including definitions, pictures, videos, sentences with context clues, etc.  If your school has money to spend, by all means, it appears to be well worth the money, but I know for some of us, spending even a penny more isn't an option. 

With that said, let me tell you what Membean has for free.  (Doesn't the word "free" have a beautiful ring to it?)  Membean has a wonderful collection of podcasts featuring different root words.  (Thanks, Membean!)  I plan to use a study in roots, prefixes, and suffixes as an integral part of my vocabulary curriculum this upcoming school year.  In fact, I plan to use Membean's podcasts as a bellringer activity in my classroom by having students make note cards to record the meaning of each root word.  I'll have students record the root, its meaning, and definitions of multiple words based on that root; they will also draw an illustration to accompany the root word.  Students will be given an online pretest to assess prior knowledge, and will be retested throughout the school year to measure to assess growth.  Below, I am sharing the template that my students will use to create the note cards.  As always, feel free to copy/print/distribute.

I recently discovered ImageSpike after reading about it on the Free Technology for Teachers blog, and I can see endless possibilities with this tool!  This would be a wonderful way to make my images more interactive.  According to the website, ImageSpike allows users to "mark up" photos with "interactive hotspots."  This sounds confusing at first, but it's easy to understand the concept once you see a "spiked" image.  It's also very easy to create one.  

To spike an image, first upload a picture from your PC or supply the URL address.  Next, click on areas of the picture to create "hot spots."  Hot spots are dots that appear on your image.  When you hover over the dot, a link appears.  You can link these hot spots to videos, web pages, images, etc.  Again, just supply the URL for the content you want to link to the hot spot.  It's multimedia on steroids.

Below is my first ever "spiked" image--a photo of Bernini's The Rape of Proserpina.  This shows how I would use ImageSpike in my own classroom: to link resources to an image, keeping my information organized and visually stimulating.  I could also see having students create images loaded with their own hot spots; this could take place of a standard poster board presentation, or could be used as part of a student presentation.  I could also have students visit a "spiked" image (similar to the image below) and then take notes or answer questions related to the media that students are directed to.  This would also work great with maps; I already have plans to create a spiked image of the journey of Odysseus to use this upcoming school year.  How will you use ImageSpike?