The Wonderful Word of Wordle!

What the heck is a Wordle? Well, I took the explanation from the Wordle website and put it into Wordle and this is what I got!From the look of things above it is about clouds, text and the frequency a word appears.

Wordle in the words of Wordle:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. 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. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

How will this apply to Educators?

The possibilities are limitless.

Here is how it works.

I asked myself the question: What do you think of when I say "Christmas"?

I went to Wordle and typed in my answer:

Click on "Go" and this appeared:

This is a neat little Word Cloud that can be customized by the user. Click on the RANDOMIZE button and you get something completely different:
I asked a colleague to take a look at the wordle above and tell me what the question it answed. She answered "What Christmas means to me?".

If I typed the word Christmas 5 times and the other words just once I produced the Wordle below:

Obviously Christmas is the dominant word. Try it out yourself at Wordle.

This is what our new Secondary Assessment and Evaluation Document produced:


I made my Wordle so now what?

The word clouds you create are yours. Feel free to save them and use them later. Use SCREENHUNTER to capture your new Wordle and save it as a graphic.

Education Applications:

• Wordle is about the love of words. You can give a wordle to your class and ask students to write about what it means to them. Pefect for a thought starter, unit intro, or ice breaker.

• Include a number of words that are motivational to you and create your own motivational poster.
  

• Encourage student's to copy and paste an essay previously completed into Wordle. The main idea should be prevalent in the word cloud created. If it isn't maybe the writer can explain why? Maybe the word cloud should have been obvious or not but either way a discussion will ensue!

• Students can experiment and learn on their own how Wordle works. The greater the frequency a word appears in a document the more prominence the word is given in the cloud. This could be a fantastic literacy/numeracy experiment that could be very enjoyable.

• Insert a poem or story to get a visual representation.

• An Advanced Wordle site exists where you can build more robust Wordles at Wordle Advanced.

• Check out the Wordle Blog for more ideas.

If you did find this Blog useful or you came up with some better uses of Wordle please use the COMMENT feature on the Blog and post your thoughts! We can all benefit.

Google, Not Just A Search Engine!

The New York Times reported Google's release of a new website designed to detect regional outbreaks of the flu a week to 10 days before they are reported by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The website is called Google Flu Trends. The site uses aggregate Google search data to estimate flu activity in each state. They believe they can estimate flu activity up to two weeks faster than goverment flu survellance systems. This is not available for Canada as of yet.

The graph below has shows past flu outbreaks from last year. Flu Trends:
"Each week, millions of users around the world search for online health information. As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer. You can explore all of these phenomena using Google Trends. But can search query trends provide an accurate, reliable model of real-world phenomena?"

I am sure this will open up a whole new science where Google uses user searches as suggested above but to what end and what accuracy?

This site can be used in a number of grade levels in a numeracy or literacy exercise to analyze trends and data. If you can come up with some specific practical uses please share with others and comment here! Don't forget to do your own trend searches at Google Trends!

Stay Current with Newseum!

Today I will be talking about a neat resource for a World Issues topic, literacy exercise, or even just a current events discussion.

The big news last night was the Election of a new U.S. president Barack Obama. A neat way to look at the effect of this event or any other current event for that matter is a site called Newseum. Newseum displays daily newspaper front pages from around the world in their original, unedited form. The papers can be sorted according to region, country and more. Take a look at todays Newseum .

There is an archive of front pages from past events but the events are major American and world issues. For example I could not locate the Canadian Election on October 12th, 2008.

The front pages are not edited or altered so consider your audience when sharing this site.
Each front page will give you a link to the source paper. You can usually find additional information on a topic without logging in.

Don't forget the WINDSOR STAR resource located in the board's student portal. Students and teachers have access to 10 Canadian Regional papers. Click Here to visit the student portal.


Thanks:

This site came to my attention from Rodd Lucier (E-Learning RELC) who picked it up from Will Richardson.

Do NOT Call Part 2

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Registry swamped
BY SARAH SCHMIDT CANWEST NEWS SERVICE OTTAWA
The Windsor Star
01 Oct 2008

Consumers eager to add their phone numbers to the newly launched national Do Not Call list to block telemarketers ran into trouble on Tuesday when the website crashed on its first day and the telephone sign-up number was not accessible. The online...read more...

The website crashed multiple times Tuesday and only allowed for 157,000 people to register. The phone line allowed for 74,445 to register. Don't give up just keep trying.

Remember you can add any number to the list and Telemarketers get 31 days to take you off their lists!



To Register:

Website: https://www.lnnte-dncl.gc.ca/

Phone: 1-866-580-3625

Registrant rush takes down do-not-call site

Tech Tags: The Windsor Star newspaper Canada

DO NOT CALL!!

I don't know about you, but enjoy being interrupted 4 to 6 times an evening with telemarketers trying to turn my phone into their business! No, not really...

The good news is relief is here! According to the Windsor Star article "REGISTER TODAY FOR DO NOT CALL LIST" you can call a number or visit a website and 31 days later you can have your phone back to yourself without telemarketers.

Bell Canada won the contract to operate the list for 5 years based on the authority of Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).

This will not stop all of the calls however, charities, political parties, polling companies, newspapers selling subscriptions and organizations with which the consumer has an existing business relationship can still contact you.

Here is the contact information:

To register call 1-866-580-3625 or visit HERE.


I would guess this is popular because when I visited the website I received this message:


The site is down temporarily. My guess is everyone in the country is trying to log on at once, including the telemarketers. I would like to say more but I think the phone is ringing...

Do You Believe?

The reason we are all in this together...

I found this from one of the blogs I like to read. I hope you liked it...

Google Chrome is HERE!

What the heck is Google Chrome? Chrome is Google's new browser de

signed make your internet experience faster and easier.  Google leaked or "accidently" distributed a comic outlining the new product.   You can view that here. The comic outlines the reason why Google Chrome was created.

Why is this a big deal?

This is Google's latest attempt at tapping into the open source software

markets where they will acually give code aw

ay and not just take it. Google will battle microsoft on yet another front.

Competition is good for us, the consumer! Currently 

there are really only two popular brow

sers out there. Interent Explorer holds 74% of the market with Mozilla coming in second with 18%.

Should you download Google Chrome??

Downloading Chrome certainly can

not hurt as it doesn't update or replace any of your current browsers. Chrome stands alone. So if you are into trying new things then give it a try!

Google Chrome was released today around 3:00 pm at the link below.

GET GOOGLE CHROME HERE!

Internet Explorer has also posted a new beta with exciting new features for it. This is one worth a look also.  Download it here

Chrome was a small download and easy to install:

Choose Download

Accept the Usage Agreement

You are done!  Happy Surfing!

SCREENSHOTS:

When you open a tab Chrome automatically lists web clip images of your favourite sites to visit!

There is only one Box to type into.  The box is called the "omnibar"  You can type in a search or website in the same box.  As you type many suggestions will pop up for you to choose.

Main Features:

One box for everything
Type in the address bar and get suggestions for both search and web pages.

Thumbnails of your top sites
Access your favorite pages instantly with lightning speed from any new tab.

Shortcuts for your apps
Get desktop shortcuts to launch your favorite web applications.

I will post a review of the new GOOGLE CHROME and I.E. 8 in the future so check back soon.  Feel free to post any of your comments on this blog about the new browsers.