With the school year all but over (well, it’s probably over everywhere but here in Manitoba) this site may not be immediately useful but for those of you covering American Social Studies or History, this is a cool little site that you’ll come back to in the fall.
270 to Win shows which candidate got how many Electoral College votes in each election right back to when the system was first started. You can even find out the actual tally of the votes. There’s all kinds of historical data for the older maps, including a chart that shows the margin of victory by the color fo the state.
It’s a neat tool if you’re actively following the current election or if you’re researching the results of earlier votes.
My new favorite site is Wordle which I found out about when I stumbled across this lesson idea here. Impressed by the lesson, I decided to try it for myself.
For their last English class of the year, I had my Grade 8s look up an article on Wikipedia or one of the more “thinky” newspapers like the National Post or the Globe and Mail. The idea was to find an article that would be too hard for them to understand on their own.
The kids then copied the text of the article, and pasted it into Wordle’s text box. They then set Wordle to work. When the Wordle word picture was produced, they could clearly identify the more important terms in the article by their relative size in the word picture. If they didn’t know those terms, they could then look them up somewhere like Dictionary.com.
The idea seemed to work fairly well, and the students really liked Wordle. Being the last class of the year, I wasn’t too concerned about keeping the kids going full blast the entire period, but, despite that, I noticed most of the students continued to play with Wordle long after I was forcing them to do it.
There’s something intellectually useful about Wordle, and visually appealing with its ability to rearrange words and change colors. The site would be useful in an English or Social Studies class, or it might even make a good Art project.
I spend a fair bit of time looking at all sorts of cool and (hopefully) free tools you can use on your computer in your classroom. This past week I found someone else who’s been trying to do the same thing. Richard Byrne’s Free Technology For Teachers blog is a pretty good site. Even if you like what I bring out, this guy does it just a bit differently and highlights a few sites and tools that would never occur to me. It’s nice to see a blog similar to mine, yet one I can also learn from myself. Go take a look.
As the year winds down and I spend more time preparing my students for exams, I’ve been a little startled just how little some of my students know about the larger world around them. They don’t seem to know major events in recent Canadian or world news. Even worse, a lot of them lack the motivation to find out. Since I can’t leave this situation the way it is, I’ve been musing about how to change it. How do I get them to find out the key events in the world without it seeming like much work?
Having the students set up and check some sort of RSS feed seemed the most obvious solution. Naturally, some of my less motivated students will think this way of checking the news is too much work. Being determined to leave them without excuse, I’ve recently disovered a cool little tool that allows you to set up and customize your own RSS feed, from whatever news sources you want, and embed it in your website or blog. Naturally, it comes from the folks at Google.
I’ve played with a few similar tools from other sources, but this one seems to be the easiest and most flexible to use. Maybe it can make the difference for my not-so-worldy-aware students. We shall see.
