Month: November 2009

What to do with Wordle

Dale 3 Comments

Have you tried Wordle?  If you provide the text, Wordle will create a word cloud that will display each word used in the source text in a font size based on the frequency that the word appears in the source. The more the word is used, the larger it appears. Take a look at Wordle’s gallery to see some examples.

Some have criticized Wordle by suggesting that Wordle’s only attribute is that it is eye-catching.

I’m okay with that. I can work with eye-catching. Below is a Wordle I made using all the text from a recent test.

Wordle the Test
Wordle the test at Wordle.net

A few days before the test, I shared this with my students. They were eager to hypothesize as to how words like “astronaut” or “gravy” would be used to access there knowledge of friction and momentum. Some student suggested possible questions that used the terms from the word cloud. A few of their questions were so good that I plan to use them next year.

While Woodle wasn’t able to teach physics, it was able to start a conversation. That’s perfect. I can take it from there.

Office 2007 Demos: Get up to speed

Dale

Well, it happened. Our school finally upgraded to Office 2007. I was reluctant to be happy about the switch. The new version took away all the menus just when I was starting to figured out where everything was.

However, after a few weeks of use, I have grown to like the new Office. Yet, I still get stuck from time-to-time with the new version.

The good news is that Microsoft has a real treasure trove of demo videos on all sorts of things within the entire Office 2007 package. The sad thing is that they hid them away at there website where you have to download each video one-by-one to view. (Come on Microsoft, streaming video online was innovative in 2005. Where have you been?)

Fortunately, someone has posted all these videos to YouTube; making browsing through them much easier.

Here’s what I recommend, go here to see what videos are available and then find that title at this YouTube channel. I think the Word video above is a perfect place to start. Share which ones you’ve found valuable in the comments below.