Check out The National Library of Medicine (NLM) resources for K-12 education, including a number of games. The library is a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and also has an excellent weekly podcast on a wide range of topics.
These days multiple word cloud options are available for students and teachers, and designing with words is an easy way for learners to create report illustrations or create graphics with spelling or vocabulary lists.
Word design sites offer users a range of opportunities. Some create conversation bubbles, others form shapes and images, and other word cloud sites evaluate short passages taken from reading material. While word designing is not, strictly speaking, an important 21st Century digital world skill, these websites encourage kids to organize information and create in clever and stylistic ways — activities that were not easily accomplished before web 2.0 arrived on the scene.
Many people are familiar with Wordle – the original word cloud site — that is especially clean, easy-to-use, and without advertising. Yet, as with everything else in the digital world word cloud sites are increasing. Sites building off Wordle’s success offer various options for saving, sharing, copying, and embedding, but no one word cloud site offers everything. Most of the sites below allow users to format with colors, fonts, and typeface sizes.
Check Out These Sites Continue reading “Wide-ranging Ways to Design With Words”
Just about every day I have a grammar question, despite that in junior high school I was an ace at diagramming sentences. Most commonly I need to figure out how to punctuate something I have written. I search for an answer, and I want to remember the information — if possible — so that I can use it the next time the same question arises. Yes, I could consult The Elements of Style, On Writing Well, The Chicago Manual of Style, or countless other good grammar books.
These days, however, when I am puzzling over a comma or a particular word, I almost always go online to find a podcast at Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips. I listen to the explanation, usually accompanied by music and amusing examples, and even days later I still remember the rule or the spelling or usage — even if the topic has not reappeared in my writing.
If you have not checked out the Grammar Girl podcasts, take some time to do so. They are great fun — two words that I never associated with sentence diagrams.
Continue reading “Grammar Girl Podcasts – Listen and Learn!”
It’s a privilege for me to write occasional posts for the Teaching Tolerance blog. However, years before I ever wrote a word for the Tolerance website, I used it as a reference and information source to develop my teaching skills and expand my understanding of the world.
You should too.
If you don’t know about Teaching Tolerance, an arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center, or if you don’t visit the website on a regular basis, you are missing an ever-expanding information universe focused on human rights, diversity, anti-racism, community-building, acceptance, tolerance, inclusion, and much more. In the digital age, with information and misinformation moving at lightning speed, we cannot learn too much about these topics.
Continue reading “The Teaching Tolerance Website: Use It-BookMark It!”
The Common Craft website is filled with great tutorials on digital topics of all sorts. When I want to learn about something unfamiliar, Common Craft is one of the first places I look for clear — and simple — explanations. And parents and teachers today need lots of digital explanations as we all navigate 21st-century learning landscape.
The tutorial on QR codes is great. I can’t embed the video here on the blog, because a user needs a subscription to do that, but I’ve made a small graphic of the tutorial. Click on it, visit the Common Craft site, and watch the tutorial.
And while you’re at it check out some of the other tutorials. Learn more about Common Craft membership.
What if our children had instant access to a library with thousands of books from countries all over the world — a place that invited them to drop by, read, and learn about one another (and without driving)? Imagine what they could find out about the world’s cultures, celebrations, languages, differences, and also about what they have in common.
That just about describes the mission of the International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL), an online destination hosted at the University of Maryland. The massive website, with digitized books in 61 languages is the largest online collection of multicultural children’s literature, and everything on the site promotes reading and the love of diversity.
Continue reading “International Children’s Digital Library: Changing the World One Book at a Time”
If you haven’t had enough of hurricane Irene, PC Magazine just published 10 Mobile Apps for Tracking Hurricane Irene. Some are free and others are downloadable for a small charge.
Applications come from government agencies like NOAA, but there are also some that are more survival oriented. One helps users develop and share a disaster plan.
Nixle, the application on the left, allows a user to set up connections with data sources so the information comes to you. Every app is not available for every mobile platform.
Check out the PC Magazine presentation, featuring something for every type of disaster tracking personality.
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