Wordle and Word Power

CCAttribution License http://www.wordle.net

This image was created using the Web site
http://www.wordle.net

Thought the software behind this image, and the site itself, are not open source, the results you create are licensed using the Creative Commons Attribution License. You are free to use the image in any way you want.

The images are created on-the-fly and randomly based on text you paste into an on-screen form. Once the image is created, you can choose to modify it in several useful ways, you can get it redrawn with new color choices, fewer words, change case, orientation (vertical, horizontal, mix, anywhichway).

Make sure you capture the image(s) you like because it won’t necessarily be much like the next redraw. You can save the image to the Wordle site, and if you do, anybody else can make use of the image you saved. You can post the link which is automatically generated on site.

The text used to generate this image is the U.S. Declaration of Independence, but you can use any text you want, making it suitable for discussion starters in your classes. Paste in an article and get students to begin analysis of the importance of terms that appear. The bigger the word, the more times it occurs in the text.

Thanks to this site for making me aware of Wordle.net:
http://h30411.www3.hp.com/discussions/viewTopic/p/topicId/51053/Wordle.htm?messageBoardId=700&webPageId=1002100&order=Recently%20Updated&flags=&posterId=&viewSelect=&forum=Lesson+ideas+(6th-8th+grade)

 

Audience

In my neck of the woods, Massachusetts, school is about to start for the 2009-2010 academic year. Teachers have rested, restored, researched, reviewed, and generally gotten themselves ready to perform again, to act on all the training and experiences they have had. They are ready for the job ahead, giving students the chance to develop new skills and build on the ones that they more or less mastered the last time around.

Teachers are about to have the opening day meetings with the superintendent, principal, curriculum coordinator, department head, etc. That mixes with some scurrying around to make sure all the textbooks have the school’s official stamp in them, and there are actually enough desks for the arrival of the audience.

After reading a blog post about journalists, bloggers and the “audience”, it seemed valid to remind us all that students are a teacher’s audience. The students are ready to interact with the teachers they have and with the tasks they are assigned and…

In this 21st century, they also have the tools to be really interactive. It may be just a guess, but I think it is true. I bet there are more students doing live publishing to an Internet audience than there are teachers doing so.

There are Facebook, Twitter, Edublogger, WordPress, among other tools. There is email, too, with a more direct connection even if it is with a smaller scope. Email reaches those who are in the “To:” list and maybe the recipients “Forward to:” list and reactions appear very quickly in the “Reply to all” messages. Facebook, Twitter, etc. can have an even bigger audience if you get “followed”.

So what does it mean for the final year of the first decade of the 21st century? If your teaching is amazing, your students may talk about what they learned in your classroom. If your teaching stinks, they may also talk about the classes that really rot. Especially, if your teaching stinks, students will ask each other for help before they will ask to stay after school to get extra help from you.

Embrace the challenge. Get hooked in to the tools of the Internet yourself, Mr./Mrs./Ms./Miss Teacher. Find out what it means to be part of the wider interactive process of learning going on these days.

If you have embraced email on a personal level, consider taking it to the next level and connect with your students by email, and with their parents. Be honest, don’t give them the false hope of constant one-on-one interaction. Parents do generally have brains. They know that having even two children to handle around the breakfast “minute” before the bus arrives doesn’t leave time for accepting the squabbles which delay everything. Students and parents will value honest interaction from you, even if it is periodic instead of instant feedback to a yammered question. Your superintendent and principal have probably harped for years about “keeping the parents informed”. Email can be a path that works for you on many levels. Students who know you send email to thier parents will need to acknowledge the assignments you mention. Parents who know what your expectations are may be willing to support them at home. Administrators might even acknowledge your effort, even if they cannot recommend a raise.

Go further, if you dare. Start a blog. Write about your assignments from the perspective you have of them. You are a teacher. Teach with all the tools at your disposal. Don’t hand out a reading assignment from a 10 year old textbook and then drone on about it in class the following day. Give the reading assignment. In your blog, encourage students to find supporting information on the Internet. Talk about your understanding of the content, and give them some links to sources about which you are aware. Encourage them to leave comments at the blog about other sources they find. Make your blog an extension of the classroom discussion. Students will share their finds behind your back because their friends appreciate their effort. Build in that curriculum support to the assignments you give. Your effective students should be able to get wider appreciation for what they were able to do.

If you are not sure about this and want help, that’s fine. ASK! There are teachers who have been eager early adopters who are already telling how to do it. If you cannot find a local “guru”, look beyond your school’s walls. There are numerous early adopters talking about the 21st century tools. One example is Greg Kulowiec, a dynamic history teacher in Plymouth, MA. Take a look at his blog: The History 2.0 Classroom.

Find out more directly from Greg by looking into two events. Greg is going to be a presenter at the MassCUE Technology Conference, October 28 and 29 at Gillette Stadium. Since the Massachusetts Superintendents organization, M.A.S.S. is co-sponsoring the conference, there may be more opportunities for school personnel to get attendance approved. ASK Tomorrow!

Greg is also going to host the TEDxPlymouth gathering at Plymouth South High School and is also tentatively scheduled for October. TED is all about “Ideas Worth Spreading.”

Look, too, at other teacher blogs. See what they are doing.

Leave comments here about the best ones you find. Include your own, of course.

No matter how you embrace the 21st century tools available to education, take the step into your classroom, your stage. Look directly into the eyes of your students, your audience. Begin your interaction.

 

GNU Generation

High school teachers, if you teach programming, or even just computer “literacy”, here is something for you to do for your students. Promote the opportunity for your students to get involved in a free software project.

The Free Software Foundation has instituted an annual contest that will award a GNU powered netbook computer to a student at the end of each year and a tee shirt monthly based on feedback from the projects that students work on.

http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/gnugeneration

This is a “real world” opportunity that can take your students’ work out of the ordinary limits of classroom assignments, and can engage your most eager students to use their talents to advance the FOSS community. You know some of your students will benefit. Give them the chance. Tell them about the opportunity, encourage them to get involved. Offer to give them support, too.

 

Digital Library

How big is your school’s digital library?

What is in it?

How do you get access to it?

Who “controls” access?

There’s a free access magazine on the Internet that covers issues related to the digital content of libraries.

http://www.dlib.org

In the most recent issue, an article titled:

“21st Century Shipping
Network Data Transfer to the Library of Congress “

Between 2008 and 2009 the Library of Congress added approximately 100 TB of data to its digital collections, transferred from universities, publishers, web archivists and other organizations. The data comprised a broad range of content from photos to video, from books and periodicals to websites.

WOW!

I am not suggesting a school might or should have a digital collection like that, but aren’t we at a point when educational support materials can be made more accessible if in digital formats. And, though an IT department might have the skills to maintain the integrity of the content, it probably should be a librarian who is the “maintainer” of the data. It needs appropriate cataloging, integration into the scope and sequence documents of the school, etc.

Certainly, any materials that are available in the public domain and other licenses such as the Creative Commons Attribution license should be considered for inclusion, even though they are available from sources on the Internet. I would argue for local copies instead of just links to the content housed elsewhere, but maybe some combination of the two is appropriate.

More and more teachers are creating materials with computers, but I would bet that most of those materials are not often shared even among colleagues in the same building. Creative effort in an educational setting needs a place to shine through the walls of the individual classrooms. What better place to collect such artifacts than in a school’s digital library where they can be accessed, used, expanded and possibly even outlive the tenure of the individual who created them.

A school or district could even gain positive notice by generating a critical mass of such content and making it available to other schools. Naturally, such a generous spirit requires that the materials be properly licensed, but what makes more sense than that? Tying the material up in copyright because a teacher might hope to be made rich? Unlikely…and probable, too that most teachers don’t get into the field of education with expectation of riches. The more probable scenario is that the individual items in the digital collection are made more powerful when mixed with other items in the collection created by others.

Of course, I would recommend that as much of the material be created or converted to an open format so that tie in to a particular software program isn’t a limitation. Time has a funny way of making old proprietary formats inaccessible.

Start the committee, make the proposal to your librarian, IT department, principal, and superintendent. Get the ball rolling. It’s summer, a great time to start a digital library.

Network Data Transfer to the Library of Congress

 

Screen Captures

Summer is a great time to do quality documentation for your students’ project lesson plans. If you aren’t making your worksheets illustrated, make that your project this summer.

I regularly do individual screen shots to include in things I write. Full screen capture is easy. Windows and Linux distributions do that when you tap the PrtSc (Print Screen) button. In Windows, the capture goes directly to the clipboard from which you can easily paste the image into a document. The paste behavior for clipboard images has been inconsistent in Microsoft Word. Some versions automatically converted the image into an “inline” image which was my preference. Other versions placed the images in a “float” condition with an anchor somewhere on the page. It is possible to convert a floating graphic to inline by clicking on it and choosing the inline (as text) option. Inline graphics move along ahead of text in the previous paragraph even if you add significant text later in editing. In word, several Word drawing tools make it easy to annotate the captured and inserted images, adding arrows, image outlines, etc. Add the draw toolbar by selecting it in the View->toolbars menu.

If you want more control in Windows, you will need to get a screen capture program. I was a fan of HyperSnap (not free or open source). Others were fans of SnagIt (also not free or open source). I did find a recent description of several free screen capture programs on the following site.

http://thefreewarejunkie.com/2008/04/great-free-screen-capture-shootout.html

The only open source Windows screen capture program I found was called “zscreen”, hosted at googlecode. It is licensed under the GPL v2. When set to “file” as the capture method, it saves to a folder on your hard drive. The images can be done as full screen, selected window or region. It requires the dotNet Framework (v 3.5) and will install it if your system doesn’t currently have it. The print screen key alone does a full screen capture, and holding down the control key while tapping the print screen key sets zscreen up to do a region capture.

http://code.google.com/p/zscreen/

In my regular Linux work, I use Kubuntu 8.04 and Ksnapshot (for KDE desktop).

When you tap the print screen key, Ksnapshot pops up a window and gives options to capture individual windows, or a “region”. The region capture is best for me. It is like cropping a photo to empahasize the best parts. Ksnapshot offers options to copy to the clipboard or save the capture. When saving, the subsequent snapshots automatically increment the file name you have selected. Therefore you might name the first clip as “button1.png” and the next capture would have “button2.png” for its name already. You can, of course, change the name before saving.

For the more common Gnome desktop of regular Ubuntu and most of the typical Linux distributions, the built-in screen capture program is launched with the print screen button but does not offer a region capture option, just full screen or window. But another “version” is available as one of the Accessories of the Applications menu. It is called “Take Screenshot” and does give you a chance to “grab a selected area”.

However, the Shutter screen capture program (which was formerly was less elegantly called “gscrot”) may be what you want because it comes with more options.

http://shutter-project.org/

If you are a user of The Gimp image editing program, you can also take screen captures with it and immediately begin editing the capture.

No matter what your choice of screen capture tool and no matter what operating system you use, get familiar with capturing images and begin this summer to incorporate them into your students’ learning materials. They will appreciate your documents more because a picture is worth a thousand words…come on, you knew it was coming.

The ability to save a series of clips from the screen allows me to think through a series of steps, capturing images as I go. Then I can separately concentrate on the illustrated writeup in a separate effort.

Back to school sales are already being run. Get ready.

 

Open Format

This may be all the reason you need, to consider using open formats like the ODF of OpenOffice.org.

Speaking of different platforms, a big WOW errupted in the room when, at the very end of my presentation, I pointed out that I had started preparing my presentation on StarOffice 9 on my Solaris Sun Ray, then finished it on a Windows Vista using OpenOffice.org 3.1, then took it on a USB stick to the venue and asked the friendly Sun guy, Dave Donmoyer, who was presenting ahead of me to let me present on his Mac using NeoOffice (sorry I forgot which version). I used the odp file with absolutely no glitches. Not once did I convert it to a different file format. I’m telling you, the whole audience was VERY impressed. My last comment was “Try doing that with MSOffice” in a tongue in cheek sort of way.Oh that felt good.

http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/hanging_out_with_open_solaris

 

Math and KIG and GeoGebra

KDE Interactive Geometry Program (KIG) is a great tool for teaching math. Here is a good set of directions on how to do it.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/teaching-math-kde-interactive-geometry-program

If that article interests you, but you don’t use Linux, check out GeoGebra which is a program written in Java so it should run on any operating system that supports  Java Runtime 1.4.2 or later. You can even do a launch of the program fromt the Web.

http://www.geogebra.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=67&Itemid=63

 

Sugar on a Stick (SoaS)

Sugar on a Stick is the software originally available on the One Laptop Per Child project. Now it is separate. Walter Bender formed Sugar Labs to develop the Sugar educational interface and activity programs separated from the hardware development.

The big idea here is that SoaS makes one-to-one computing more viable. It does not need a fancy computer, just one that boots from USB (or can boot from CD with the extra ISO boot CD). The older computers being sidelined in schools can have longer life. The hard drive isn’t involved at all. Each student can have a complete learning system on a thumb drive. Prices locally (Boston, MA) for generic 8GB thumb drives have recently been around $8.00. That’s in single quantity. That’s affordable.

SoaS version 1 is now available. If you have not looked at it before because you didn’t have an OLPC, go through the steps to download the ISO image. At the very least, try it out on a regular PC by burning that image to CD. You can test the interface and find out about it. Then take the steps to make the USB thumb drive (minimum 1GB) which will let you go to any computer with a USB port and have a directory on the thumb drive to store your work.

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Linux

 

Micro-blogging: Can Twitter Count

Can Twitter Count?

I recently signed up for Twitter, already was on Identi.ca. Both are micro-blogging sites/tools.Micro-blogging is a recent addition to the arsenal of social networking. Both services have educational potential. They are a great way to do small messages to students and parents without needing a big blog (though I recommend them, too) or a Web site (Yes, I recommend you do one of those, too). Micro-blogging takes little time. You cannot write more than the 140 character limit. That keeps your effort brief, a good thing. It also makes you be concise, another good thing. Students and parents can read your daily post in almost no time, yet another good thing.

Twitter is the more popular one, but I suspect it has issues that need to be resolved before I can give it my full support. Twitter has a public timeline page, too, like the main identi.ca page. If you check the links, you can see they are pretty much alike.

• After I signed up for Twitter, I did a search for two people who recommended I try it. I couldn’t find them by last name. I couldn’t find them by user name.
• Today I got a follower notice by email from Twitter. I went to check the profile. The follower had only one post from two days ago, but already had 189 followers and was herself following 1253 other people. Because URL links are compressed automatically to save space, one cannot quickly judge the real address. It isn’t wise to visit a site blindly unless you trust the person who has done the post. As I didn’t know Lucy Khong [lucyhong], I decided against following the link on her lonely post. Then I noticed her avatar image. It had significant cleavage, and though that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it made me even more certain that this was Twitter-SPAM. I made the decision to block Lucy from following me. Update: June 19, I am more convinced that Lucy Khong is spam. Yesterday and today the blog was visited after searches for her name. I hope my comments have been helpful to anyone who visited.
• When I went to my own Twitter profile, it said I had two followers, one of them is the guy who convinced me to sign up. There was no number two.

I reiterate the title: Can Twitter Count?

And even more serious, can we count on Twitter?

Another factor for me is that Identi.ca is run on open source software from Laconi.ca. I am a fan and advocate of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) which I hope you guessed when you came to this MOSSSIG site.

Are you doing micro-blogging?
Is micro-blogging a tool in your communications with parents and students?

Do your homework. Check out the possibilities.

 

OpenOffice.org New User

Even if you are not new to OpenOffice.org, you will always have a question about how to do something. Worldlabel.com has a recent blog entry that contains a slew of links and a good breakdown of the sources of support, help, guidance and resources for OOo.

http://blog.worldlabel.com/2009/openofficeorg-new-user-orientation.html

The blog is a good general resource, too with a regular focus on, and support for, the Open Clip Art Library. You can rarely have enough clip art for your use and your students use.

Of course, while you are looking at the links there, you will notice that Worldlabel offers labels, too. That they are a company doesn’t automatically diminish their contribution. Open source FOSS does not imply never spending money. Among other items, they provide no cost downloads of templates for OpenOffice.org.

It further proves that this FOSS thing…Some companies do get it.