Wednesday, May 27, 2009

"You are what you annotate," Diigo.


Diigo is a social bookmarking tool that takes collaboration to the next level. Instead of simply tagging websites and sharing them with friends, diigo allows you to highlight, add comments, and add tags to web content. Everything you create is saved for instant collaboration with others. Collaboration with a group is made easy with bookmarking, highlighting, sticky notes, and discussions all saved through the diigo social bookmarking site. Imagine grouping students for a reading assignment and assigning the "discussion" to be done as homework using diigo. This would be great for students who may not want to speak out in class, but given the time to gather their thoughts, would be willing to share them with written comments and highlighting.

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

San Francisco Exploratorium


Science teachers looking for online, interactive labs, resources, and teaching tips should visit the San Francisco Exploratorium's educator resources pages A must visit feature of this site is the digital resources page which has podcasts and webcasts for both teachers and students, as well as full length episodes of Iron Science Teacher. This show is based on the Food Network's Iron Chef, and features middle and high school science teachers who are shown a table full of various items and have a short period of time to create a science experiment based on the items they selected. The teachers then perform their experiments with a live audience, who votes on the best one. Try this with your fellow teachers, or with your students as they prepare for next year's science fair.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Wordle


Wordle is a free online tool for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide by pasting text into the space provided or providing a URL for a website. 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. Wordle has many classroom uses, such as providing a visual "summary" of a text, a journal or discussion starter, or as a pre-reading strategy to prompt students to make predictions about what they will read.