TGIF ~ February 12, 2010
Technology Gems, Ideas, and Facts
Friday, February 12, 2010
Gem ~ a website or application that might work well for you or your students
Teacher Tap is a “free professional development resource that helps educators and librarians address common questions about the use of technology in teaching and learning”. This site has many great links under the categories of “Tech and Learning”, “Internet Resources”, Libraries and Literacy”, and “Tech Tools”. This one is worth a look when you have a few minutes. (http://eduscapes.com/tap/index.htm)
Idea ~ a way to enhance your LFS lessons with technology
Last spring I shared Wordle, a site that allows you to copy or type in text and create a word cloud that displays the most frequently-used words in a larger font. Wordle has become very popular, but it has some limitations in terms of your ability to customize the word cloud. Word It Out is a new site that works much like Wordle, but allows many more options. You can choose words to remove or tweak their importance. You can choose your own colors and sizes. You can save the word cloud to their site (publicly or privately) or embed it on your own site. Students could use this site to analyze their own writing to find overused words or enter the text of a speech to look for general themes. Here’s a word cloud I made using a news article about this week’s weather…
Fact ~ Just a bit of information
Make your own personalized candy heart at http://cryptogram.com/hearts/.
Have a great weekend!
Anne
2 Comments Already, Leave Yours Too
Anne – This question is unrelated to this post, but I had a question about blabberize for you. I am a tech teacher and I want to do a blabber with my students. How did you get around creating acct for all of them with email addresses? I emailed the people at blabberize, but they have not emailed me back and it has been over a week. Any help you can give would be great.
Thanks,
Ramona Towner
Hi Ramona,
Good question! In this case, I just used my account and had the kids meet with me one at a time to do their “blabber”. We had taken pictures of their illustrations ahead of time, so when each student met with me he/she uploaded the picture, drew the mouth, and recorded the message. It honestly only took about 3-4 minutes per student. I worked outside their classroom in the hallway and the students came out during their center time.
I know that doesn’t really answer your dilemma, but that’s how it worked in this case.
Anne