How about quick way to create up to 44 different activities based on up to 500 words? Find your favorite vocab list and head to Textivate. Once the words are pasted into the box on the Textivate page, generate the desired activity. There is even a “?” that can be clicked so the user can get directions if s/he needs help.
This would be fun to use in so many classes – really anything with vocabulary, matching, math problems and answers, events, it could be used for almost anything text-based.
As I shared in the last post, I love learning about tools that are new to me from the learners taking our Classroom Technology course. This is another of those times. Wondersay is a very cool little app that animates text. Pick a quote or statement, and let it animate your work. Click here to see an example in action (WordPress left something to be desired in the area of embedding…).
This tool would be great for a set to project and grab students’ attention when entering a classroom or to animate a website. A Wondersay could also be created by students of any age and then shared by a link as no account is required to create one.
The quote you’ll see, I like it so it is here too. Happy Friday!
Ideal teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross, then having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create bridges of their own. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis, Greek writer/philosopher
One of my colleagues is working on a project using Apple’s Pages program, part of the iWork Suite. Oddly, when she is connected to the internet (anywhere) the program runs more slowly than if it is not and she has had several situations where she creates a file in Pages and after closing it, the file will no longer open. At first, we both thought that the problem was the same as what is described in several discussion forums (like this one), but after further investigation, she believes the “corruption” of the file only seems to happen when a computer is connected to the internet or our school’s network.
We both are coming to love the Pages program, but this glitch can be a problem. After discussing it with my colleague, we thought I should share it here and see if there are any others with similar observations as she did not see any discussions online about this aspect of the problem.
I am one of those who are really bummed about the news that Yahoo is dropping delicious. I know many like Diigo, and I just never got into it before as I really liked delicious – now, not so sure which direction I’m going to go. I already saved an html file of my bookmarks from delicious (click “Settings,” and then under “Bookmarks” you’ll see “Export/Backup Bookmarks”) and it did save the notes I had for the links, but not the tags. 😦 I think I’m going to investigate Google Bookmarks and Diigo next. In the present, what a pain. In the future, I already miss exploring everyone’s tags and bookmarks in delicious.
No Time to Sleep 