Saturday, 23 May 2009

Open & Networked Teaching: A Transformative Journey

Alec Couros gave a fantastic talk today on the benefits of open and networked teaching. In his one-hour passionate and inspiring presentation, he made attendees reflect on the nature of knowledge, the change of learning paradigms from individual to social, the benefits of sharing instead of hoarding.

Thursday, 7 May 2009

WordSift: Tool for visualizing text

Wordle taken a step beyond?

Apart from showing the most frequent words in a text in the form of tag clouds, this tool integrates visualization of word relationships and Google searches of images and videos. You can see images of the words, word webs, definitions, sentences where those words appear, etc.
Some of the applications suggested in the tutorial below include:
  • pre- reading activities, e.g. making predictions about a text, introducing unfamiliar vocabulary
  • post- reading activities, e.g. creating word webs to explore connections between words, writing a paragraph including some of the most frequent words