Word Clouds

You are probably all very familiar with the  popular word cloud called Wordle. However there are others that you might like to use with your students. Last year in Year 7 History we introduced students to Tagxedo which they used to create a visual image of  their prior knowledge of the Nile River.

Students enjoyed  turning their  words into visual images, customising  the font, colour, theme and shape.

 

Below are some other word cloud tools that you might like to investigate. It's worth putting the same text into all of the text boxes and see what tools are most appealing to you.

 

Word it Out.

 

 

Word it Out creates word clouds from text,like Wordle. It also allows you to choose font,colour themes and also size.

 

Word Sift

Word Sift from Stanford University allows you to study a word cloud. Like wordle it allows you to enter text and then turns it into a word cloud. However it doesn't allow you to customise but allows you to study the text. By clicking on a word,Word Sift lets you view the meaning in an online dictionary.It would be good for ananysing speeches.





Using online Newspapers in the Classroom

There are now a plethora of online newspapers that  our students  are able to  access. Newspapers still remain valuable tools for helping students to understand a variety of perspectives on  newsworthy events and incidents in Australia and other countries. This week I have been alerted to some useful tools:
Newspaper Map

This easy to use website allows you to access newspapers from over 130 countries and read them with the assistance of Google Translate.This could be useful to study how issues are covered in other countries and of course would be a great tool for foreign language students

Online Newspapers.com

Newspaper websites can be searched by country and region and retrieved quickly. Online magazines are also included with free links to world wide magazines covering many topics.

 

Newseum



 

 

Newseum displays  the front page front of over 2000 newspapers worldwide  on  each website each day. Papers can also be translated using Google Translate.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



The teenage brain

 

The ISC has just purchased a copy of Frances Jensen's newly released "The Teenage Brain". Frances is a neuro scientist and her book is a survival guide to raising adolescents. The Mindshift blog has also extracted some interesting highlights from a recent interview with Frances. In the ISC we also have a copy of Nicola Morgan's "Blame My Brain", another enlightening read. These books and the article help explain why some of our students are having difficulty when it comes to self regulating their use of social media and gaming. They don't know when "enough is enough". Click on the image above to read the Mindshift article and/or come to the ISC to borrow the mentioned resources.



 



 

Assessment and Learning

 

If you have thought about online professional development  you might consider Melbourne University's   Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills   course. This free  online six week course commences on the 20th April and ends 1st June. It entails approximately 4-5 hours study per week. The course is based on five years of research and covers the skills deemed to be necessary in the future.

For more information click on the image below.

 

 

 



Student Centred learning

I was most interested in   Jan's in house video last week (in our staff meeting) where a number of students were asked "What makes a good learner?" I was surprised to see that responses were so teacher centred.Click on the image above to access a great article form Edutopia that asks "How Student Centred is Your Classroom?" There are some guiding questions there to help you  reflect on the learning environment you design for your students.

 

2014 Words of the Year

For your interest, here are some words that dominated popular culture in Australia, the US and UK during the last year.
Macquarie Dictionary
Mansplain (verb) - a man explaining something to a woman, in a way that is patronising because it assumes that a woman will be ignorant of the subject matter.
Category winners:

  *   Agriculture: crash grazing
  *   Arts: binge watching
  *   Business: drip pricing
  *   Colloquial: mansplain
  *   Communications: emoji
  *   Eating and drinking: share plate
  *   Environment: green electricity
  *   Fashion: loom band
  *   General Interest: decision fatigue
  *   Health: ambulance ramping
  *   Internet: typosquatting
  *   Politics: defund
  *   Social Interest: lifehacking - the application of strategies to simplify or improve one's life
  *   Sport: urban exploration
  *   Technology: selfie stick

Australian National Dictionary Centre
Shirtfront - to challenge or confront a person.

Oxford Dictionaries 2014 Word of the Year
Vape - to smoke an e-cigarettes via vaporised nicotine.