TagCrowd will take text, whether it be from a website or a file, and create a visual depiction of the most commonly used words in that text. What uses could this possibly have in the classroom? Well, David showed us TagCrowds he made from presidential inaugural speeches - students can compare what was important to the country through the years. He also showed TagCrowds from various speeches made by different people about a single event - students can see what was important about an event from the perspective of different cultures or countries. Another thought I had was to have students create TagCrowds for their essays or papers - they can see what words they may have used too frequently, or they may see that their focus is different than what they intended. What a valuable and visual way to teach students the importance of the words they choose! Another participant at the session this morning suggested that students create TagCrowds on text that is written in casual language versus formal or academic language.
I used TagCrowd to evaluate an essay I wrote about leadership for a graduate school application and here was the result:
Hasn’t the last few days been exciting? No matter what your politics, it has actually been nice to see so many people get so excited about something. Those of us who use Twitter and Plurk know just how easy it was to get wrapped up in following what everyone had to say about the things going on in our country.
One thing that came out of the election coverage for me has a classroom application, so I thought I’d post it here. On one of her twitter posts, Jennifer Dorman (cliotech) said she was following the news the day after the election from all over the country using News Map. I went to check it out and found a great, free web tool!
What News Map does is aggregate news from all over the world in one place. It displays the headlines in a visually stimulating way — those headlines that are getting the most reads are larger than others. There are tabs to specify specific countries across the top and specific categories along the bottom. All you have to do to read a news story is click on the headline and you’ll be taken to the source.
I see this as a great tool for students who are doing current events projects and also an easy way to keep up with the news. Visit the site then come back here and add a comment to share what uses you see for this free tool.
Did you know that all STAR DEN members have a blog hosted by Discovery? After presenting an entirely too brief tutorial at the Regional Conference about our blogs, I’ve realized that many STARS don’t realize they have one. I decided to put together a little video tutorial about how to start using your blog. (If you are not yet a STAR, click on the ribbon in the top right corner of this blog!)
As I prepared this, I realized I can’t possibly go into every aspect of maintaining your blog. The tutorial is meant to be a brief introduction so that you’ll know where to go to get started. I encourage you to explore and try out all the features until you get your blog the way you’d like it.
To see examples of other DEN STAR blogs, visit the Directory of STARS which can be accessed from the National DEN Blog (or by clicking the link above). This directory is constantly updated and shows the most recent activity on DEN STAR blogs as well as on Leadership Council blogs.
One of the things I have always said about the DEN is that when I’m given just 10 minutes in a room with DEN members, I come away with more valuable information and useful tools than I ever do in an entire day of professional development. Day 2 at the DEN LC National Institute proved to be an entire day of professional development that gave me the number of tools and ideas from those 10 minutes times 20. I am on overload! My list of tech tools to get is growing, my store of knowledge to apply to my lessons has increased, and I’m so excited to be here for a few more days!
I will dole out the ideas one or two at a time over the next few weeks so you won’t have to be overwhelmed as well. The tool I’m going to highlight today was one I learned about in Mike Bryant’s breakout session on Google Earth. It doesn’t really have a lot to do with Google Earth, but it is a fantastic tool that I’m going to keep my eye out for. It is called Eye-Fi. If you have a digital camera that uses an SD card, then this little gadget will work for you. Eye-Fi is an SD card that replaces your current card. When installed in your camera, it can automatically send any pictures you take to a Flickr, Picasa, or any other web-based picture storage account (you set it all up and tell it what to do). If you purchase one that has the geo-tagging feature, it can also automatically store the location in which the picture was taken and it is viewable in Google Earth.
The cost of these little 2 gig cards varies from $80 to $130 depending on whether you get one that geo-tags. As Mike Bryant said, “Imagine what the price will be next year”, speaking of the tendency of technology gadgets to drop in price over time. Put this on your “watch” list. I used Mike’s laptop yesterday afternoon during a presentation and got to see all the pictures he was taking throughout the institute downloading on to his computer as he took them. This is a really cool technology and one that has so many potential uses in both our personal and professional lives!
Panopto has announced that it is making its new classroom capture platform, CourseCast v2, available to K-12 educators free of charge through their Socrates Project. They do ask that educators who take advantage of this opportunity agree to participate in its beta testing, as the official software will not be released to the general public until July.
If you have not experienced or participated in streaming lectures, you should check this out. Streaming is the current buzzword in the edtech community. It is a way to expand your audience, by streaming your presentations/lectures, or to expand your own professional growth, as you watch a streaming session from your location.
Educators interested in CourseCast v2 may complete the enrollment form. Once you’ve tried it, post a comment here to let us know what you think of it.
I’m sure you’ve heard the term “social butterfly” before. Meaning someone who flits around from place to place, being friendly and making friends, it is a term that takes on new meaning in the cyberworld. Yesterday, I was making a social feed widget at one of my favorite sites Widgetbox (try it out and be sure to check out the Blidgets!), and I realized how crazy it is that there are so many social networking sites out there. I felt compelled to join the ones I didn’t already belong to (and found out that some of the ones I didn’t think I belonged to, I did). I joined them all just so I could make the complete widget. I began to wonder . . . is there such a thing as too much networking?
This morning on my drive to work, I heard a news report that said that people who social network are the biggest timewasters at work. Hmmmm.
I came home from work and saw my kids networking in their various ways and sat down at my own computer to check my LinkedIN to see if there were any new connections there, which reminded me to look and see who had posted new stuff on Facebook, which brought me to . . . you get it, right?
So I began to wonder. Am I a social butterfly? Butterflies have wingspans that measure in inches. The largest one, Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing, has a wingspan of 11 inches. Hook your thumbs together and flap your hands to look like a butterfly and you’ll get a pretty good estimate of how big it is. Because I’m involved with nearly every social networking site out there (as far as I know), somehow I think I might have a larger wingspan than that. Enter the Pteranodon. These were prehistoric flying animals with wingspans of 30 feet. Their wings would have cast a really large shadow wherever they went, encompassing everything it encountered. I think maybe I’m a social pteranodon. Unfortunately, pteranodons also became extinct. Hmmmm. Do I need to learn something here?
Here are my questions to you — are you a Social Butterfly or a Social Pteranodon? Do you think there can be too much of a good thing? How do you maintain balance in your social networking life? Post your comments here . . . in this social networking venue . . . as I go Twitter about this post.
I’ve been surfing the internet a little more this week than usual and have found three sites that I thought I’d pass on. I decided to pass them on together because they are all the same type of site - free books! In no particular order . . .
ReadPrint has thousands of full text books available online. You can search for them by title or just browse through the list of authors.
FullBooks is a little more minimalist in design, but appears to have a lot of content. I couldn’t find a search function and their books appear to be listed alphabetically by title.
Planet eBook by far appears to have the most complex site. There are free books for download, but there is also a blog, a newsletter, and they invite you to suggest books you’d like to see added to their collection.
Next time you are going to be on the road, download a few good books to keep you company. Try these sites and comment here to let us know which is your favorite and why.
I recently visited the profile of a friend of mine on MySpace. He had just returned from a trip to South Korea and had posted a map on his profile that showed all the countries he’s visited in his lifetime. I decided to go visit TravBuddy (the site that had produced the map) and check it out. As you can see, I’ve only visited 1% of the world’s countries. My friend has visited 6%.
There is a community attached to TravBuddy so you can connect with other people or blog about your journeys. It is completely free, although there are links to book hotel rooms and other travel-related marketing.
The uses in the classroom that I can see are: the obvious, have students make a map of where they’ve been. They can compare with other students and discuss similarities and differences. They can even blog about particular places they’ve been or do a presentation for the class about somewhere that only they have been. My next idea is to have a classroom map - show all the places the class has “travelled” to this year in geography or in books they’ve read.
You can even make a map of future travels to show places you’d like to or already have a planned trip to. Check it out and post your ideas here — do you see a use in the classroom? Do you already use this or a similar site in the classroom? Meanwhile, I’m planning some trips so I can try to beat my friend’s 6%!
One of the things I like to do when I start working with a new group of people is find ways to streamline the things they are already doing. This frees up time for everyone to be more creative and I find that people tend to be happy when they have more time to be creative!
A tool that I was introduced to by Fred Delventhal from Virginia about a year ago has consistently been very helpful to me and I thought I’d pass it along. It is Doodle. Doodle is a free, web-based utility that can help you schedule events, make choices, create polls, etc. I’ve found it to be especially helpful in determining when would be the best time to schedule meetings so that everyone involved can attend. I can also see this being helpful if you are wanting to poll a class or a group of parents; a student could create a poll to scientifically gather opinions from their peers about a particular subject; one could even schedule who is bringing what for those all-important potluck dinners!
You receive a link to send out to all the people you wish to poll. They enter their name and their choices and can even add comments for everyone to see. It is a great collaborative tool!
Give Doodle a try. You’ll find it extremely easy to create a poll and then you’ll just sit back and wait for the results to come in.
I asked my middle-school children a question this morning as I was driving them to school - “Do you know why some people call televisions “tubes”?” They responded that they did not, after which my husband and I started enlightening them on the wonderful, albeit ancient, world of the tubed television.
Well, my post today has nothing to do with THAT tube, except for the probability that the sites originally got their names from the same place. You’ve seen and heard of YouTube, then there was TeacherTube — now there is DNATube! Yes, for you fellow science teachers, there IS a tube for us!
It is a scientific video site where scientists are encouraged to upload their videos. There are lectures, experiments, animations . . . you name it! Some of the offerings are very high-brow in their explanations, but the graphics are up-to-date and could be a very interesting addition to your own science lessons. I haven’t spent a lot of time there, but I think it is well work bookmarking and using as a resource. If you have any success doing so, or if you just want to highlight a particularly good resource from the site, comment here!
Via RSS
