Tagxego

Here's another word cloud idea.  It's called Tagxego.  You'll notice the difference right away. 

It's described as follows.  “Tagxedo turns words -- famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters -- into a visually stunning tag cloud, words individually sized appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurrence within the body of text.”

But beware!  Just like with Wordle, Tagxedo is not monitored. 

Wordle

Here’s a neat idea for spelling, vocabulary words or a poster for your classroom.  Try Wordle. 

“Wordle is a toy for generating 'word clouds' from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.”

One word of warning.  Wordle is not monitored by an adult.  So it is possible that you could get there with a class only to find some rude examples in the ever-changing gallery.

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale

Zazzle

The holidays are upon us.  There are so many ideas you can use throughout the holidays from holiday cards to calendars to mugs and t-shirts.  It’s endless.  I've used Zazzle to purchase my Christmas cards in year's past.  I also got personalized stamps at the same site.  They have lots of sales throughouth the holidays and a quick delivery time, too.  So here’s the link.  Enjoy! 

IKnowthat.com

Many of you like to set up educational games you find on the Internet for your students to use during center time.  This week I’d like to introduce you to a site that you might like to use for that purpose.  It’s called iknowthat.com.   Once you register/subscribe to the site, you have access a large array of educational games on a variety of grade levels and subjects.  Check it out!

The Newspaper Clipping Generator

The Newspaper Clipping Generator site is a place where students write fictitious newspaper articles.   What a fun creative writing exercise idea!  It doesn't have to be done in conjunction with April Fool's Day, but that would be fun.  It also works well with history, science and language arts projects.

NCS teachers - If you would like the children to work on this in class, we could type it up in the computer lab.  Let me know if would like to do this project together.

 

Multiplication.com

Learning multification facts is a necessary tool.  But for many children it's a struggle.  Multiplication.com is a wonderful site for children to practice and anchor multiplication facts.  There are lots of practical resources for teachers, too.  Here's the link if you want to check it out.

Icon Finder

A few years ago I shared with you an icon site called icon finder.  They have some sweet graphics!  At one time the grapics were free, but soon they will be a mix of free and icons for sale at their marketplace.  Don't let that scare you off though.  There are plenty of free graphics still to use.  During the month of December, they will send you a download of free graphics as a teaser to their site.  So check it out!  Here's the link.  

Compfight

 

Compfight

Let’s face it.  Google Image Search can be a problem.  Here’s a safe idea for searching photographs.  The results are both plentiful and beautiful.  Try Compfight which uses pictures from Flickr.

 1. Enter your keyword in the search box.

2. Click to set the copyright options.

·         Creative Commons is on ONLY.

·         Seek Original is ON.

·         Safe Search is ON.

For NCS Lower School teachers, I’ve saved this site on the Lower School Tech Tuesday Edline page.  Be safe and have fun!