Saturday, February 21, 2009

Wordle

This image was created with Wordle.  I can see many classroom applications for creating word images.  This program allows you to print out your designs, use them in a blog or save them in Wordle.   The Wordle image on the left  contains the names of teachers that I worked with recently and from whom i learned quite a bit particularly about literacy for very young learners.
Joe Dale has provided a quick Slide Share of directions for using Wordle. (This is best seen full screen by clicking the tiny screen at the bottom).  Nik Peachey has also posted some intriguing  ideas on how to use Wordle for English language learners.  One tip that will help you use phrases is to join them with a tilde in between.
Another tip is that if you want the size wordle you see here you need to take a screen shot of your creation, turn it into a jpg. picture through a program like Paint and then use the jpg. to upload to your blog.

Literacy and Web 2.0



I am just finishing teaching a course on writing in multicultural communities for teachers in Prince George's County, Maryland.  I've posted most of the lesson plans for the course in the sidebar of this blog in the same spirit of sharing that I have experienced through online courses in the Electronic Village Online, through contacts with other webheads, and through edubloggers such as Larry Ferlazzo, Nik Peachey and Vicki Davis.  I hope that some of the ideas in these plans will facilitate someone else's planning by serving as a jumping off point for their own creativity.  We all benefit from George Siemen's concept of connectivism which defines learning as networking and I'm hoping that some of the links in these plans will contribute to others' developing and everchanging networks.

Sunday, February 08, 2009

Magazine Cover with Flickr Photo


My creation
Originally uploaded by Anciana
As part of the Images4Education course that I am taking through EVO2009, I am discovering more and more used for photos on Flickr. At the BigHugeLabs site you can create so many things with photos. I used one of my own photos to create the magazine cover on the right. You can also use photos to create maps, movie posters, puzzles, and many other items.
The creation of all of these items is free as long as you keep them in cyberspace but you can also pay to print them.
Flickr can have many pedagogical uses for language development. One suggestions that I learned in the Images4Education course are creating poems or paragraphs in the comment section of a photo. Some topics for thought are "where I'm from", "where I want to be"and "what my dinner table looks like".