Thing 14

9 11 2008

Wow, so many toys to play with! Don’t make me pick!

I played around with Mnemograph because I thought it would be useful for an assignment dealing with timelines. I didn’t explore it fully, but I found it a little frustrating. Maybe with more time. I like the fact that students could link timeline activities to images, but the size limitations might frustrate them also.

One that I really could spend a lot of time with is Wordle. This cool little tool allows you to enter a bunch of words and then make sort of a “word cloud” with many options. It can look semi-serious (never my favorite), or it can look wacky (closer to what I would choose). I can see this as an option especially in a creative writing course as an example of an abstract poem. Or it could be used as a way to encourage concise writing, asking students to use only 10 adjectives to describe a main character and put them into a Wordle cloud. Very neat!

I also want to take a look at Quizlet, because my friend Lynn has already seen how cool this one is.