Jun

23

Wordle

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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.

Jun

2

Lookybook

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When I saw Lookybook, it was one of those sites you see where you ask yourself, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Lookybook is simple. They take kids books, scan them so you can see the pictures (but not always quite read the story) , and then give you the opportunity to buy them through places like Amazon.

The concept is a great one because pictures are key to buying kids books. A brilliant story with lousy illustrations will not capture a kid’s attention. Buying kids books online has always been a problem for that reason. Yet those of us pressed for time have trouble getting to a store to actually see the illustrations in a book. Even if you can get there, there’s a good chance the book isn’t in stock.

Lookybook seems to provide a nice alternative. Now you can see the book before you buy it. The site is searchable, and, while there aren’t a ton of books there yet, more are being added.

Lookybook is a great idea and I predict a brilliant future for it.

May

16

Read the Words

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Read the Words is a website that does just what it says, it reads the words. You can take any written text, whether a Word document or a website, upload it or give Read the Words the URL, and it will give you an MP3 of that text being read.

The reading is, admittedly, kind of clunky. I tried two different voices, and while the male (Michael) was better than the female (Allison) both sounded mechanical. The first voice I tried was Allison, and she seemed too fast. The site lets you slow down or increase up the speed of recordings to suit your taste.

One thing I noticed in the readings is that punctuation counts. If you’re going to use abbreviations, you need to make sure the periods are in the right places.  Mr Smith is not said the same way as Mr. Smith.  This can be confusing if the author of your document has been sloppy with their punctuation. It might also make a product like Dr Pepper sound funny since there is no period after the first R.

The readings are NOT hard to understand despite the mechanical tone. For students who have trouble reading large amounts of text, this could be a valuable tool. The site can also read French and Spanish in addition to English, but I’m not sure how well that would work. This is a neat and potentially very useful site.

May

14

How cool is this? Grammar Girl

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You can never have too much technology or too much teaching in your classroom. Why not combine them in your English classroom in the form of a podcast?

I just discovered a really wonderful site, Grammar Girl, where Mignon Fogarty holds forth in her podcast on all sorts of interesting and often obscure points of grammar. The episode for May 1 is on Yoda’s grammar and sentence construction, while some other episodes have dealt with topics like spoonerisms or the more mundane run-on sentences.

Fogarty is easy to listen to and pretty clear in her explanations. If you’re not clear in your own mind on a point of grammar, she seem to me to be an excellent resource. She’s also easy enough to understand that you should be able to download an mp3 of her podcast and play it for most high school classes.

The topics also seem to be mixed enough - the mundane and the offbeat together - that I’m likely to become a regular listener of Grammar Girl.

(Crossposted from TeachEng.us.)

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