Wordnik: The web's best dictionary and thesaurus

Sometimes you come across apps and tools on the web that just serve the purpose they were designed to do and Wordnik is definitely a brilliant example of this.  Wordnik is quite simply the best online dictionary site and should be in the favourites bar of every teacher and student.

Wordnik is a true 2010 web dictionary.  For example if you search the word cat it will give you all of the stock standard dictionary definitions and meanings on the word but you will also find examples of using the word correctly in a sentence from various articles across the web.

You will also find an audio file for correct pronunciation and flickr photos relating to the word.  To further this you will also find data relating to the use of the word and references to it in Twitter.

All in all Wordnik  has taken the role of the Oxford style of dictionary which has been pretty stagnant for nearly 200 years and introduced a range of web 2.0 technologies to enhance it's use as a learning and reference tool.  Check out Wordnik here.

BBC Magic Key - Great Literacy site for Junior School Students

Just a quick one today.  This is a great site for junior school students to learn about full stops, sentence, structure, capitals, seeing spelling patterns and identifying characteristics of certain words.  Our junior school regularly use this site in their literacy sessions and I would highly recommend it to others.  Check it out here.

Photovisi: Easy Photo Collages on the web

As a follow up to my visual literacies lesson earlier in the week Photovisi might be an idea as another presentation tool for you to try with your students.  Photovisi is a free and easy to use online tool to create photo collages. Select one of the many collage templates, add your photos and then customize by dragging items around. After the collage is finished, it's available for download and print! Want to try it out? Click here to start!

Amazing interactive Greek Mythology Site for Students

What is it?  I came across Winged Sandals a number of years ago and was really impressed by the amount of effort and detail that had been put into this beautiful site retelling Ancient Greek Mythology.  My kids learnt the stories of Zeus, Athena, Medusa, Icarus and Achilles.  Dicovering who they were and most importantly the message behind their tale of fate or bravery.  Then all of the sudden it just disappeared for around 4 years.

The great news is that it is back and better than ever.  Winged Sandals has beautiful animated stories, a games section where you can replay some of the most famous events of Greek History, Make & Do for teachers to get creative with their students, a who's who? of Monsters, Gods and Mortals, A history Section and even a chance to ask the Oracle a question about life.

There is a good units worth of work here for teachers to offer their students and best of all your  students will really love the interactivity and edgy artwork behind the site.

How can I use this with my students?  I find this a great tool for literacy to teach students about fables and mythology.  They can use this site to read see and hear the most important stories of Greek mythology then discussing as a group what the message and meaning was behind the story and how to subtly work into a tale.  Obviously for History teachers there is a wealth of great content here and anyone studying any form of philosophy or political science will need to pop in for a visit too.

I personally think there is something here for people aged  6 to 106 and would strongly recommend taking a look at Winged Sandals today.  Let us know what you think too.

Download and clean up Video Files

I am sure that many of you have used a Youtube or similar video from a tube channel in the classroom and thought 2 things.  'Wouldn't it be good if I could download and keep this somewhere?" and "Is there something I could do to clean up this crappy quality video?"  The answer to both of these questions is yes.

Savevideo.me  allows you to simply drop in the URL of any video page and it will download it as a .flv video file straight to your desktop.   Realplayer SP is still the best I have seen - after you install the free version it will automatically just give you the option to download any audio or video stream within your browser.  It then instantly gives you the option to convert it to a number of formats.

Once you have your sometimes grainy and poor quality video saved you might want to take a look at Vreveal - this little pearler simply does some amazing things to shaky and grainy videos to dramatically improve them.  This one offers a free 30 day trial but is very cheap to purchase if it meets your needs.  This is what the FBI use to identify people in crowds on CCTV. 

Would love to hear your thoughts

Another Timeline Alternative

Preceden lets you organize important events into multiple layers. This makes it very easy to put everything into perspective and see how events relate to each other as time goes by.

The one clear use something like this has is the making of autobiographies. As it allows you to see how your professional life blended with your personal one and vice versa. Preceden is free and available here. 



The Ultimate Guide to Wordle for Educators

For the uninitiated Wordle is essentially a word cloud generator that creates word clouds from text you either manually enter or draw from websites, news feeds or utilise tags from a del.icio.us account to create a visually appealing word cloud which you can customise and stylize to suit your needs.

The beauty of Wordle is that there is no signup or login and the whole process can be completed in as little as a minute depending on how complex you wish to get.   Here is a Wordle I generated from my website at www.edgalaxy.com

Wordle is incredibly popular with teachers and students because of its simplicity and capacity to offer multiple open-ended opportunities across all curriculum areas.  So today I am going to share some of my knowledge of using Wordle and some Lesson ideas that will hopefully make Wordle your preferred option next time you do a class brainstorming session or you are looking for a tool to inspire some creativity in your lessons.

First off here are a few things you need to know about Wordle:

Wordle graphically emphasises words that have been repeated.  So if you are doing a class survey on your favourite sports teams always remember to enter terms that have been included, These emphasised terms appear larger and bolder on your finished word cloud depending upon the number of times entered.

Wordle does not understand multiple words such as Harry Potter.  This can be very annoying at times as Harry Potter will be recorded as two single words.  You can get around this by joining words.  Ie:  Harry-Potter, Harry~Potter, Harry_Potter or HarryPotter.

Managing Your Wordle

Your finished Wordle can be output in either three ways.  Printout, link to webpage to be viewed in a public Gallery or you have to manually screen capture it and create a digital image.  It is almost criminal that such a great program does not have a button to generate a Jpeg Image or something similar then and there but...  

You don’t have to stop with your customiisation just there as there are a few little tricks you can do to spice up your Wordle beyond randomizing colour schemes and fonts. Such as..

Overlaying Wordle on a background Image.  This can add some real impact to your Wordle.  Simply select an image to put in the background and then follow the instructions below.  The finished product looks like this.  This is Barack Obama's inaguration speech put over a soft White House Logo.

To do this : screen capture the Wordle and then open it in Paint Shop Pro (you can use any program) Import your background image as a new layer and moved it to layer 1.

Use the magic wand (the selection tool to erase all the excess white space on the Wordle. And lay it over the top of your Background Image.  Bingo!! You can also add effects such as drop shadows to your Wordle at this stage to further enhance.

 Importing and Cropping your Wordle.  There are numerous ways to do this depending upon the Platform and Software you are using but this video explains in detail how to do it in Microsoft Word.  It is a simple task in any language.

Turn your Wordle into a Coffee Mug or T-Shirt:  Why??? I am not really sure but it can actually look pretty cool and might be a great personalised gift.  Here are a couple of companies that will do it all for you online.  You just supply the image and the cash.

http://www.zazzle.com/

www.cafepress.com

www.spreadshirt.com

 Some Lesson Ideas:  The web is literally crawling with hundreds of brilliant ideas on how to use Wordle so consider the lesson ideas listed below as suggestions.  Take these ideas and alter them to suit your own needs.

• Go to an online discussion forum – paste the URL into Wordle to gain an understanding of the key points.

• Prior to a lesson go to a news website and create a Wordle from a topical news story or collection of headlines.  Put the contents of the story up for your class to see and get them to see if they can determine what the news event may be.

• Break down the lyrics to a song or dissect a poem to see what are the key components.  Below is a Beatles Wordle, Can you guess the title?

• Spice up a History lesson by finding a webpage outlining a historical event and create a word map from it.  What are the key factors of that event?  Below is a D-Day wordle.

• Weekly spelling words – From a test type in the word that was most frequently spelled incorrectly as a group. Your hardest words will be the largest.

• Convert a project into a Wordle and turn it into a Presentation.  All of your key points will right in front of you.

• Study an Authors vocabulary in depth by entering a single page or segment from a book you are reading.

• Class Rules and Expectations.  Remember to enter in the words you want to emphasise.

• Classroom Polls and Surveys:  Simple classroom Polls can take a new look.  Once again remember to re-enter multiple votes.

• Dissect a Famous Speech – Copy and Paste the entire Contents of a Speech into Wordle.  What points were trying to be emphasised.  Here is Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" Speech

• Character Analysis Mind map

• Create an all about me Poster sharing all the aspects that make up you.  The good, The bad and the Ugly.

• Convert a simple Recipe using the quantities in correct ratios as words.  Keep it real simple such as a sandwich.

As stated earlier Wordle's capacity in the classroom is only limited by your imagination.  I hope this guide has helped you get your head around some fresh or different ideas for using Wordle and I would love to hear some of the great ideas you may done with it also.

Brilliant Web Based Graph Maker for Students

Create a Graph is very simple to use web based Graph Generator that I can highly recommend for younger students who may find a spreadsheet such as Excel a little daunting.  A very simple interface lets you select from Bar, Line, X&Y, Area and Pie graphs and takes you through each stage of the graph making process in simple to understand language.

There are examples and tutorials, not that you will need them and you can output graphs as either a traditional paper based printout or get a hyperlink to view your graph online.

Be sure to take a look at Create a Graph next time you are doing a statistics and data lesson with your kids and want to generate a graph simply whilst teaching your kids the steps required along the way.It's free of course with no sign up required and there are a few other useful tools to be found on this site also.

By the way if you are looking for a great lesson plan on Creating Pictographs on Computer with younger students.  Here is one from my lesson plan section.