Word Sift

Here's a cool tool I discovered in this list today. It's called Word Sift. You paste some text into a box and click Sift. A bit like Wordle it identifies the common usage of words in the text (the example above in keeping with Black History Month is Martin Luther King Jnr's "I have a dream" speech). You can then sift this again alphabetically (A-Z, Z-A, Rare to Common, Common to rare). A further sift is supplied according to curriculum relevance. I chose the word "time" and clicked on Language Arts.


Beneath the text appear pictures (sourced from Google I imagine) and the very cool Visual Thesaurus, which presents synonyms for the selected word as a kind of mindmap.

Using this tool might be a great way to do an initial analysis of a longer piece of writing for common words, themes, related images and map of meanings before the detailed line by line reading.

EtherPad and other cool Web 2.0 applications

Over at the Creative Tallis website we are attempting to compile a list of useful, free and esay-to-use web applications to enhance the learning experience. The latest link on the Creativity Resources page is to a service called EtherPad. This can be used to create real time collaborative word processed documents. There are other sites that allow you to do this but EtherPad seems to be a real no fuss alternative. There is no sign up and sharing is achieved via sending an email or instant message to other users.


Now that the English Faculty have a few netbooks to play with, I imagine the task of creating collaborative online documents in lessons is a real possibility. If anyone would like to experiment with this Web 2.0 tool, let me know. I'd like to pop in to see how it works.

Tallis lab seeking collaborators in English

Hi English teachers,

I currently have two year 8 groups working with me on Tallis Lab. We are in the process of working out how we can use new media and the web to make, share and reflect in a creative way. Pretty soon the students will have their own blogs, and ultimately their own websites. They also already have, or will shortly have a google Tallis Lab email that allows you to email whole class groups and also to use all of the free google docs applications. We already have class blogs that can be used to post links, news, films, audio etc. and students are learning how to email content in various forms so that it appears on the blog. You can check out the 8AW blog (ignore all the 'it works mail' - that's the students saying that they can post entries from home)

So if you teach 8AO or 8AW and you'd like to collaborate on a project then get in touch.

Soren

Creative Tallis

I'd just like to remind everyone that the school has a website devoted to creative learning and that we are always interested in examples of best practice to highlight for the benefit of colleagues in (and outside) school. We have received some excellent feedback about the site so far but we are conscious that the current examples on the Creative Learning page do not reflect the innovations in place to promote creative learning across the school. It would be great to know which creative learning strategies each of you use on a regular basis.

If you are interested in using web applications with students, check out the links in the Creativity Resources page. If you'd like to know more about this aspect of our work at Tallis please get in touch. You may be interested in how some of this kind of learning incorporating Web 2.0 interactive tools is being used in the Tallis LAB course with Years 8 and 9.

bbc iplayer

I have used bbc iplayer in the classroom alot. Recently, I used some shows from radio 4;

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00mjpnm/Front_Row_16_09_2009/

for discussion and notes with year 12 studying narrative in The Kite Runner and other texts. After initially getting past Strictly Come Dancing dude talking on about sports and dancing, skip to the last third and the discussion on narrative, narrative choices, historic narration and authors voice are fantastic. I think the class gained a great deal from this radio show; predominantly the effect and importance of narrative was massively conveyed.

I am also going to use http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00mkgn1/The_AZ_of_Dr_Johnson_Words_Words_Words/

for year 13 discussion on Language Change, we have already looked at Johnson's dictionary and other major contributory major influences on English, this radio show is perfect for adding a new medium in the classroom -other than my voice droning on!

Roopa

welcome English Faculty

Hi all,

This is a real chance for us to share news and information about classes easily! The idea is that we all have a go at using some ICT in the classroom, http://creativetallis.blogspot.com/ is a great place to find fun things to do like short activities or starters for lessons.

i have used http://www.tdbspecialprojects.com/ alot in lessons, its great to just have up as students are coming into class, one student can flip through words, verds and subjects to create interesting phrases thatcan morph sentences for meaning.

have a go!

roopa vyas