Wordle + VoiceThread + Ipad

After reading Jose Picardo's post about having used only one iPad in class, I decided to give it a go. I've recently got an iPad as a gift and wanted to see what I could do with it in class.

Well, this afternoon I took my iPad to class as I wanted to record students reading their own sentences to a voice thread created by a colleague (AureaStela). Stela had the brilliant idea to create a wordcloud with verbs which take GERUND and INFINITIVE and then asked her students to record sentences using the given verbs.

This is what I proposed to my students today:

1. First, I opened her voice thread on the IWB and played the recordings for them.
2. Then, I assigned a different verb to each student and asked them to make a sentence using Gerund or Infinitive. I monitored helping them out with their sentences.
3. I gave them a hand-out with a grammar exercise on the same topic and asked students to complete the exercise in class. Meanwhile, I would use my iPad to move round the class to record each student reading their own sentences ( I used the voicethread app for recording) . To make it faster, all students used my voice thread account.
4. After I had saved all recordings, I played their recordings on the IWB for everyone to listen to.

   Impressions? I would definitely do this again. Students were involved and seemed to have enjoyed listening to all the sentences in class.

Jing Pro + making a wordcloud background transparent

Learned two things this morning and wanted to share with Life Feast readers.

First, I watched a video made by Carla Arena where first she uses her webcam video to introduce what she's going to show and then shares her desktop. I already had Jing installed in my laptop , however, not the Pro version which allows you to record your webcam video and also publish it easily in Youtube. http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html

image originally from Shelly Terrell's blog

Second, while reading a post by Shelly Terrell , I learned you can add wordclouds to images and make the background transparent. Idecided to try it out. It took me some time to find the place where to click, for this reason I decided to make a tutorial showing it step by step. Another great tip she gave is to use ~ between words of the same sentence. Ex: in this image she has the question How~do~schools~involve~parents? http://www.wordle.net/ + Powerpoint



This is the tutorial I made.

Tagul - great tag clouds

Just discovered Tagul via Thoughts from a tech specialist . It's similar to WORDLE for making tag clouds but goes beyond. It cannot be used to filter texts like wordle does but if you want a tag cloud for your blog, it's a perfect choice. You choose the shape of your cloud, choose colours for the tags and each word in your cloud is linked to a URL and is clickable. This is the tag cloud I created with my blog tags.