Hurrah! I have finished my reading assignment (although a bit late..) and feel absolutely empowered to try some of this great new technology. Indeed, I facilitated podcasts for my students before Christmas so I guess we dabbled in the new Maslow Heirarchy of "creativity" with limited success. Here's what I did wrong: not checking that the microphone continued to be plugged in AFTER the custodians vacuumed my classroom at night. Here's what the kids did right: they used Google docs to collaborate (& I LOVE --as did they--the ease of simultaneous collaboration that Googledocs provides) on a stylistic analysis of different specified passages of The Scarlet Letter. They used the powerpoint feature on Googledocs to create a presentation.
As they presented to the class, they spoke into the microphone (which worked for the first 2 days), creating a podcast of their presentations. Therefore, students who were absent could check out the podcasts for not only their own group's productions, but those of others. We used the podcast/presentation as a "rough draft" of the paper they would write collaboratively (for they received critiques from me as well as from their peers). I would do it again (checking the microphone this time), so you know I found the experience a valuable learning vehicle for the kids. I suppose I should imbed a podcast here, but I'm not sure it would work, so I'll just direct you to the podcast page if you want to check it out.
As far as ways I'd like to encourage students to use HOTS instead of LOTS: I'm really excited to try Voicethread and/or Animito in a couple of ways: for my AP kids: we study pictures as texts. As a follow up activity, I'd like to assign a topic (like the Poverty one suggested) & ask a collaborative group to create a Voicethread or Animito---keeping in mind the strategies we study for manipulating one's readership to understand the message: fun! For CP: we study Whitman poetry. I'd like to assign each collaborative group a poem & ask them to use Animito to symbolically "picture" the poem as well as appropriate audio to capture its mood. I'm also intrigued with the idea of Photostory to use as a rough draft before AP writes personal narratives. So many exciting options! I'll let you know how it goes....