Visuwords – interactive visual thesaurus
Visuwords is an interesting interactive visual thesaurus tool. Users can look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. It produces an interactive node diagram which shows how the words are associated with other words.
Enter words into the search box to look them up or double-click a node to expand the tree. Click and drag the background to pan around and use the mouse wheel to zoom. Hover over nodes to see the definition and click and drag individual nodes to move them around to help clarify connections.
Take a look for yourself at : http://www.visuwords.com/
Read MoreInanimate Alice – a digital novel
I can’t believe I’ve not written about Inanimate Alice before. Set in the early years of the 21st century and told through text, sound, images, music and games, Inanimate Alice is the story of Alice and her imaginary digital friend Brad.
This “transmedia” story is told over 10 increasingly interactive and complex episodes. Created around a high-quality text, the story is suitable for the deep-reading and re-reading necessary for academic investigation. The production is unique in that the complexity of the story as well as the interactivity increases with each episode, directly correlating with Alice’s age and developing technological proficiency as the game designer she is to become.
Through embedded puzzles and games, together with the creative inspiration, Inanimate Alice makes the reader a direct participant in telling the story. The story is available in French, German, Italian and Spanish too.
Several episodes are available now, with more to come in the future. I’ve been really impressed with the quality of the content so far.
The Inanimate Alice website has downloadable resources for teachers and parents. On the Promethean Planet website you will find a teachers guide to using Inanimate Alice as well as teaching resources for using it in the classroom, including flipcharts, a mindmap and user generated content.
Also look at Alice’s School Report : Whiteboards.
Find out more at http://inanimatealice.com
Read MorePhonics Play – free interactive phonics games
The free area of the PhonicsPlay website is filled with free interactive games, phonics planning, assessment ideas and printable resources. There are many ideas to support teachers in delivering daily phonics sessions and lots of advice to support parents in helping their children learn to read.
This site will be of interest to teachers in Reception and KS1 who want some fun games for children to play while learning phonics.
There is also a premium area of the site which schools can subscribe to if they like the free resources. Information is on the site.
Go take a look at : http://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/
Read MoreBembo’s Zoo – fun with fonts
Just a quick link to a website that might be of interest to primary/elementary teachers. Bembo’s Zoo is based on the book by Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich. The idea behind the site is to use a font called Bembo to create 26 different animals, one for each letter of the alphabet.
So for the letter “A,” the letters that make up the word “antelope” are manipulated to form the creature’s outline. Similar things are done for “bison” and “crab,” and so on all the way through to “yak” and “zebra.”
On the IWB you could use with the screen capture tool and see if the students can work out the word from the animal. Or use it to inspire their own creations.
Check it out at : http://www.bemboszoo.com/
Read MoreInteresting Writing Prompts and Story Starters
Here’s an interesting website which contains a series of different images which can be used as writing prompts or story starters. The site is produced by Luke Neff who uses these images with his own class.
Each one involves a thought-provoking image and a question/scenario. Take a look here: http://writingprompts.tumblr.com/
If you want to make your own, then you could use sites such as The Big Picture to find powerful images and combine them with a question of your own.Use the screen capture tool to grab the image and bring it into your IWB software, or copy/paste into PowerPoint.
You could also use a Flickr search engine or look at Flickr Groups such as FlickrSoup for the Soul or Tell a Story in Five Frames.
If you know of other great story starter sites, let me know in the comments.
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Five Funky Flickr Tools for Teachers
Flickr is a fantastic site for sharing photographs with others, and as such it’s also a brilliant resource for finding and using photographs to use in a lesson.
There are lots of websites that use the Flickr API to pull in photographs from Flickr and use them in quite creative ways.
Here’s 5 to get you started.
1. Flickr Poet
Flickr Poet is a quick way of turning a poem, sentence or chunk of random text into a sequence of Flickr photographs.
If you are using IWB software you could use the camera tool to capture your creation and put it into your notebook file (or the good old Print Screen and Art Program like I did to create the image above)
Go try it out now : http://www.storiesinflight.com/flickrpoet/
2. Five Card Flickr
Five Card Flickr draws from nearly a thousand photos on flickr tagged with “5cardflickr”
You are dealt 5 random photos from Flickr and you choose one to add to your story. You then repeat this 4 more times until you have 5 photos that you can then use to tell a story.
You can then write your story on the blog itself, or you could display them on the IWB for students to write their own stories individually.
If you have photos on Flickr that you’d like to add to the pool of images used, then just tag them with 5cardflickr.
3. Spell with Flickr
Spell with Flickr is a fun site for those times you want a word to look really funky and you’ve exhausted all the fonts. This pulls in photos of letters from flickr to make your word. Embed into your blog or use a capture tool to grab the image to use in a flipchart.
4. Phrasr
Phrasr asks you to type a phrase and the site will pull in words from Flickr to match each word and then animates them in sequence. You can save them, and link to old ones via the archive. Here’s an example.
5. Bookr
Bookr is from the same people who produced Phrasr. It lets you use flickr photos to make picture books which you can publish or share. A nice tool for literacy.
Also – don’t forget these previous blogposts to help you find and use Flickr images in your lessons:
- 10 Fab Flickr Groups for Teachers
- 12 Useful Image Search Tools
- Powerful Images to Give Lessons Punch
Like these links? Please leave a comment below!
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8 Word Cloud Makers for Teachers
A word cloud is an attractive way of visualising a large chunk of text in a more pleasing way. It shows the most frequent words used throughout the text. The larger the text, the more commonly it was used. It’s a good way of seeing which words are used the most in any piece of writing.
Here are just a few ideas on how you could use Word clouds in the classroom:
- Guess the book – works great when you have access to the text of famous books via sites such as Project Gutenberg.
- Use to introduce a topic – pupils could guess what they will be learning about from a word cloud made of keywords.
- Comparing different newspapers – look at the same story in a Broadsheet and a tabloid newspaper (website) and compare the wordle clouds produced – how do the words used differ?
- Self-reflection on work – as Wordle makes a word larger the more frequently it is used, pupils will be able to see at a glance which words or phrases they are over-using. Are they using the word Nice or Good too often?
- Use to analyse the content and gist a longer written text, especially with exam or higher level groups
- To introduce new vocabulary or to memorise new vocabulary/vocabulary lists
- Revision of key topics and vocabulary – pupils can create their own worldes or they can be given them to use
- To give presentations without reading from a sheet and just using prompts
- Encouraging creative writing from a selection of key words from a word cloud
Here are some more ideas for using word clouds in the classroom.
There are many different websites available that will let you create your own word clouds, here are 8 of them:
Probably my favourite word cloud generator, and the one I tend to use most of the time. It doesn’t generate fancy shapes, but it works well at what it does. It does need Java to run, so I do sometimes hit problems on some school networks that are over-zealous on security.
http://www.wordle.net
Tagxedo is my second favourite, and the first place I try if Wordle is blocked in school. It also allows you to create fancy shaped clouds, so many teachers will prefer it over Wordle for that reason. Tagxedo can even export as a file good enough to print on a tshirt.
ABCya is a simplified word cloud maker aimed at younger students. Infant teachers might want to take a look at this for use with their classes.
http://www.abcya.com/word_clouds.htm
Like Tagxedo, Tagul lets you create word clouds in various different shapes. It’s very simple to use.
Tagcrowd is more like wordle in that you can’t choose the shapes, but it works quite well.
Another simple wordcloud generator, like Wordle and Tagcrowd you can’t choose the shape.
Word Mosaic lets you choose the shape of the world cloud from a small variety of shapes.
http://www.imagechef.com/ic/word_mosaic/
This is slightly different to the others in that the word cloud produced is pretty basic. But it does have the additional feature of linking each word to a visual thesaurus. Click on the word to get it’s meaning, and see how it is linked to other words.
So what’s your favourite word cloud maker? Or what’s your favourite use of a word cloud? Share them in the comments below!
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Teaching Library – literacy ideas and lesson resources
Teaching Library is a place to find free teaching ideas and lesson resources, all linked to books that can be used in the classroom. Each book has ideas for uses in different areas of the curriculum, along with related video content and downloadable materials. You can browse by category or author.
As well as the books that are listed, the site will let teachers add their own ideas, to build up a bank of useful lesson ideas. Primary teachers should definitely take a look at this site and add it to their list of bookmarks.
This is another great website by Mark Warner to add to his excellent stable of Teaching Websites. Go check out the others!
What do you think? Let me know in the comments!
Read MoreBlabberize – make talking pictures
Blabberize is a fun site that lets you create talking heads and record your own voice to go with it.
It’s pretty simple to use – and it’s free. Upload a photograph, define the bottom of the mouth and the chin (this is the bit that moves) and then upload or record a sound for it to say.
How could you use this in class?
- You could create a talking lesson starter image.To introduce a problem or a question to the students.
- Have a famous person from history talk to the class,or a character from a book.
- You could use it to introduce dialogue in a foreign language
- Or get the students to create their own – either in a different language, or putting the words into the mouth of a character.
Thanks to Simon Woodhouse (who I met back at TeachMeet Bedford) for the idea of using Lord Sugar from The Apprentice to introduce a task that the students would then solve. He used it in Business Studies but it could be used in other subjects too (Science investigation anyone?). A shortened version shown below as proof of concept. (Apologies for the dodgy impression, it was done in a rush – it’s a little more Michael Caine than I was hoping for!)
The finished products can be embedded into blogs and websites, or you can just link direct to the page. Like this.
If you have an iPad then also check out PhotoSpeak which is a great app which lets you do similar things (and even animates the eyes too, it looks great!)
Have you tried Blabberize? Let me know what you think in the comments
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About Me
Danny Nicholson : Educator, Science teacher, ICT Consultant, PGCE lecturer, Author and Web2.0 / SMART Masters/ Interactive Whiteboard Trainer. Contact me for any training requests. 
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