Academic Musings & Tech for Learning

The Tech & Learning blog has a great post -Why Wordle-By Steven W. Anderson – with an excellent slide presentation and commentary on how one can use Wordle in the classroom. Wordle is about words, giving the user a visual representation and can be used in many ways in the classroom, and in all disciplines. The more often a word is used in the text, the larger it appears.

It’s also an easy-to-use Java applet. Go to wordle.net to try it out. Click on the CREATE link and you’ll find a page where you can type in, or paste in, any text. You can also type in the URL (web address) of another page or a del.icio.us user name to see their tags as a Wordle. In this example I used the text from the Why Wordle blog post. Two important tips were mentioned in the presentation on the blog post. First, you can delete individual words in the Wordle by right clicking on a word and click on ‘delete xxx’ from the little menu. [PC Users]. Secondly, use ~ to connect two or more words together to be used as one term. If you want to enlarge the size of a particular word, just type in several more times. The more often a word is used, the larger it is.

Saving your Wordle can be a bit tricky. You can save it to the Wordle gallery by clicking the button on the page, and link to the URL  – that’s the easiest thing to do. You can also print it right from your computer.  If you have a PDF creater installed on your computer you can save it as a PDF using the Print Function.

Or,  you can do a screen capture to save it to your computer. The FAQ’s refer users to this site , which is pretty good, for more information about how to do that. Basically, you press the PRT SC [Print Screen] key on your computer. In my case I also have to use the FN [Function] key as that button is shared with the Insert key. The image is saved into short-term memory, and you have to paste it into another picture editing software application and save it from there. Your image is lost, replaced by a new image when you use the Print Screen key again, or turn off your computer.

Weebly is a free online web page creation and publishing site. I’ve been working on a Weebly site, Tek4Ed, site to replace my GooglePages site and have found it to be very user-friendly, complete with drag and drop editing. They now have a special service just for educators. Features include:

• Managed, protected environment with easy password protection
• Easily add Multimedia features including videos, photos and more
• FREE ..  and includes 40 student accounts for teachers. You  can buy more, too, in packs of 10 for $10, and you can upgrade to a Pro account for $39.95/year
• NO Advertising!

Weebly provides over 70 templates with the added flexibility to completely customize your own, and it’s all hosted for free by Weebly. You can also use your own domain name at no extra charge.

You can create blogs at Weebly, too. However, I couldn’t find a way to import or export posts, which means I’ll keep using other blogging engines that do, such as this one which using WordPress.

By the way, tomorrow “Using Weebly to Design Classroom Websites” with special guest Dan Veltri will be the Classroom 2.0 webinar session. Details are at http://live.classroom20.com. If you miss it, check out the archives  at http://live.classroom20.com. Click on the “Archive and Resources” page to view the past recordings.

Weebly – For Educators

Weebly – Free Website and Blog for Everyone

Here’s another great resource from Lenva Shearing, Getting Tricky with Wikis. You will find code and directions for altering the appearance of wiki pages – and the code could also be useful for using in other place.

You’ll also find out how to add students, password individual pages, wrap text around images, put comment boxes on the page and more.

Here are a few great resource aggregations of Web 2.0 tools

On Wikispaces there is WebTools4u2use put together by school library media specialists with ideas for how to use some of these. CoolToolsForSchools was created by Lenva Shearing of NZ’s Bucklands Beach Intermediate School and includes a description of each of these tools – and she’s used them all. Both sites are easy to navigate and fun to explore.

For a wider spectrum of Web 2.0 tools visit http://www.go2web20.net/ which has a really comprehensive listing of web apps divided into 20 categories including travel, twitter, business, blogging, fun and e-learning.

Free application to capture and record stuff on your desktop – absolutely fabulous for quick how-to’s and sharing .. Jing at http://www.jingproject.com/ . There an intro and video on how to use Jing at http://blog.jingproject.com/2007/07/how_do_i_use_this_thing_called.html. There are MAC and PC versions. TechSmith makes Camtasia, and Snagit. Jing is akin to Camtasia “light” and may be a great solution in lieu of the more pricey Camtasia or Captivate.

I made this quick tutorial using Jing to show how to edit the slide master in my Jeopardy game.

It very simply captures screenshots and sends them to your flickr account .. or gives you a link to share it or embed it .. but much more than that, you can record a voice narrated tutorial as well and annotate the screenshot. Check it out.