Running with Scissors

Yesterday I read posts by Alan, Gardner, and D’Arcy on a new web application to generate “prettier” tag clouds called Wordle.

First thought was, “oh, cool. Prettier tag clouds of my del.icio.us feed. I like pretty.”

But this tool can do much more than simply shine up your del.icio.us tag cloud. The really powerful feature here is that you can create a tag cloud from ANY text that you want to drop into it. Suddenly, song lyrics, poems, or news articles can be analyzed in a totally new way. Seeing the words this way allows sparks of different thoughts - it makes new connections.

Here is an example of the tag cloud from one of my favorite U2 songs entered into Wordle:

And here is one I created from the text on the Wikipedia page about a certain “ideology” making the rounds in the edtech sphere these days:

You also have control on how the tags get arranged, the colors, the font style, the number of tags to include and more. Jonathan Feinberg, the creator of Wordle, has also created a site that posts a gallery of the most recent Wordles that others have created. The gallery is an interesting browse as well.

I spent last Friday in my daughters’ elementary school as a presenter for Career Day. I was representing the “instructional technologist” occupation - one that I get a lot of practice explaining since most adults don’t know what I do either.

I brought a video projector and some of our iClicker student response systems to show the kids in kindergarten and 3rd and 4th grade. Kindergartners got to vote on “What is the BEST color” (red and blue were very popular), while I had the older kids choosing a favorite between SpongeBob, Harry Potter or Jack Black (SpongeBob and Jack Black were the winners here). After a few fun questions like this I told them about how we can use the clickers to test what students understand. So, the last question I had for them was “What does an instructional technologist do?” Most of them got the answer that I taught them - “Help students and faculty use technology to make their teaching and learning better.”
I also had a good number of kids who preferred a different answer that I had as an option - “Plays video games better than anyone else” - what they wanted my job to be.

Either way, they loved it. They liked the voting and I had no problems with the technology the 11 times I went through it. And my presentation held their attention, even among the police cruisers and firetrucks that other presenters brought, so that was good too. And as a bonus, there are a group of kids in elementary school who know more about what an instructional technologist does than their parents do. :)

Some would argue that if you test drive a car you cannot afford, you are simply wasting your time.

Maybe.

I’m currently evaluating some software from Tidebreak called TeamSpot. It allows students to collaborate using a large screen and their personal laptops. This software allows all the collaborators to control the large shared screen and the computer connected to it, as well as share the view of their desktop, or allow full access to allow others in the group to interact with their computer. There are more interesting things here, and I’ll detail them in upcoming posts.

The kicker here is the cost - it is quite expensive, and our financial picture is not rosy as far as adding something like this in the near future

But it is making me think about how we can energize some informal learning spaces and allow places like the game room or dining hall become dynamic learning spaces. It also has me on a frantic search of the open-source community for something that is similar.

What would you do? Do you take the ride in the Cadillac?

Based on my current reality, I’m making a goal of at least one blog post per week. This doesn’t count as the one - it is coming next. :)

Thanks to Gardner and Shannon for the inspiration.

… we had an early snowfall here at UMW. I was able to walk around early that morning and take some pictures, before it melted away later that day.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

I created this slideshow with flickrSLiDR, a web site that simply asks you for the URL of your photos, sets or tags in Flickr, and creates the code you need to embed in your blog. It took all of 2 minutes to create this slide show.