Jul

3

One Laptop Per Child

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I continue to be fascinated by the One Laptop Per Child project launched by Nicholas Negroponte. This video presents the project in his own words.

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

18

How to fix a computer that doesn’t work

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It may not have worked as well, but, personally, I prefer Super Grover’s solutions to the little girl’s.

Jun

16

A great little blog

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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.

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