Two amazing Web2OH apps

I have had the fortune to be introduced to two Web 2 Oh apps that have really inspired me.

The first is Wordle. Love it, love it, love it! Create word clouds on any text you copy and paste into the Wordle text box. Then use the other tools to arrange, rearrange, color, and change fonts. Very interesting what word clouds look like of particular passages. There's also a gallery where you can publish you Wordle creation and view those of others submitted to the gallery. In fact, here's a Wordle based on the text of this post:



And the other cool tool is JOTT. Use your phone to call JOTT (a toll-free phone number) and have it transcribe your voice into text. You can add various phone numbers so you can call from different phones. I still have to try it from my Tracfone, which sometimes gets a bad signal while in the car (I am not in traffic when I do this of course). JOTT has all sorts of potential uses. Memos, notes, thoughts, contacts, etc. Lots of stuff to try!

Are we having fun or what?!?!!?

Edutopia's coverage of using technology

Here's a pretty cool clip of how one school is using technology in the classroom. Edutopia is a good source of new and interesting ideas for accomplishing learning.

Edible Dinnerware

I'm sitting here at my desk eating lunch. Now that Spring has arrived, I'm getting back into having salads for lunch. I love Romaine. But that is not my point of this post - this is - it occurs to me that I don't need the paper napkin I have left over from a trip to Quiznos last week (let's not go down that road), to wipe salad dressing off my face.

I have a plain slice of bread sitting here (naked bread you might say) and I realize that I could dab the corners of my mouth with this slice of bread. At the end of lunch I'll just eat my napkin (the bread one, not the paper one).




This will work at home, too, where we use cloth napkins instead of paper. Even though we are one evolutionary baby step closer to reduce, reuse, recycle, we still have to wash the cloth napkins every so often. Thus using precious water and heat.

Why not bread instead? (That sounds like a good slogan). Bread companies of the world take note - advertise your slices as tasty, "recyclable" dinner-ettiquettable (I know, but somebody has to come up the the new words in our language!) mouth daubers.

This gets me thinking about all the other things we use at meals that don't have to end up in the dishwasher on a regular basis. Celery knives and spoons. Carrot stick forks. Zuccini bowls. Pumpkin bakeware. I'm not exactly sure how we could fry up some eggs for breakfast, but I bet somebody's got an idea!

Actually, I remember eating at an Ethiopian restaurant in NYC and we sat at a traditional table. The food was served on this humungous (it had to be at least 3 feet in diameter) round of flat bread that was our communal plate. The waiter served us right from the pot of legumes. A big dollop right in the middle of the bread. We then tore off pieces of our plate and sort of used it as pincers or tongs to grab a bit of legume paste (this was more tasty than it sounds in writing, I swear!) and sort of rolled it up to eat it. The fish stew was a bit trickier. I highly recommend going to an Ethiopian restaurant that serves food in a traditional manner. This is a very good exercise for the "been there, did that" crowd.



So here's to food - may we all be as adaptable and indispensable as a radish cup.

Spot the Croc

Can you see the crocodiles in these two photos?

They really are there! There's a young crocodile in the first photo and an adult croc in the second photo.

This isn't a test of your ability to pick details out of a couple of photos. It is to demonstrate that sometimes animals are pretty good at disguise.

Which is my lead-in to talking about how there are things in education that may also be disguised, appearing differently on first observation than they do if we look more closely at the details.

Games are one such creature. Increasingly, educators are considering games (a term that can carry many different meanings) as potential learning tools. There's also increasing research into gaming as a way to learn and it looks pretty supportive of the whole idea.

Recently in my ETAP 526 course, we took a look at several different types of game-like learning tools. I took some time to look at an electronic version of drill and practice software, a college course that was a simulation/game, and another simulation environment that required a level of interactivity.

If you're not "into" gaming, then you probably have never heard of Typing of the Dead. Based on a well-known shoot-em game called House of the Dead II, this has the participant shoot zombies by typing in words that appear on the screen.

The trial version (free) gives you pretty good practice, but if you are a hard-core student of the keyboard, you might want to go for the full paid version. I found it heart-pounding as the zombies approached brandishing all sorts of weapons and bad breath. I also found out how REALLY BAD my typing is! I'm sure I've been hacked to death for misspelling togehter (see I did it again!).

Check out these two YouTube videos to see what I'm talking about:

English                  Japanese

More later on the other simulations I talked about above.