Redefining Instruction With Technology: Five Essential Steps

Wordle is a tool that allows you to generate “word clouds” from text. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently. You can arrange  your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. You can take a screen shot of the ‘Wordle’ and use this for a variety of purposes.

Can you Guess the Wordle?

Create wordles that are linked to any KLA and grouped according to particular to certain criteria or attributes.

Students could be divided up into teams and are encouraged search the internet for clues, and then come back as a team to decide on a final answer.

Tier the task by beginning with 1 common attribute – step it up to 3 or 4 for a more challenging task.

For example – the words below have 1 common attribute.

All  accessories

2 common attributes

All Australian Mammals

(Adding kangaroo and koala to the list would simplify this task)

3 common attributes

Australian athletes who all won gold at the 2008 Olympics

Advertise or promote your class Novel

Focus on Australian Geography

Western Australian Towns

Students could research to identify how many attributes they have in common eg all towns from Western Australia

Follow-up activities

-map the towns

-design their own wordle for each other eg all Australian towns that have a ‘Big’ …………..  banana, prawn etc  as a tourist attraction

HSC QUIZ View Survey

HSC SURVEY View Survey

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2534

Where to find iTunes cards on sale
http://www.giftcardsonsale.com.au/

The following is a spreadsheet with the SCOOTLE key for each schools who have registered for SCOOTLE before the 19th July 2011.  LINK

If your school is registered your school’s key will be recorded alongside your school’s name 

Then just follow these steps:

LOCATE your school – COPY  the link – PASTE into browser and ENTER your personal details.

If your school is NOT registered

 follow the instructions for setting up SCOOTLE within your school

OR

the LT coordinator from each school may contact SCOOTLE manager

Cheryl Fahey

Maitland-Newcastle Diocese

Mob: 0439 604 426

Email :  cheryl.fahey@mn.catholic.edu.au

Changing your email login for SCOOTLE

If you have already registered with SCOOTLE using your ceo.woll address and you wish to change to your .dow address AND if you have content already created in SCOOTLE eg Learning Paths etc that you wish to keep, you will have to export your content then apply to change your email address. For those wishing to do this please see the following link for instructions for doing so.

Creating Learning Paths

For instructions on setting up your own learning paths please follow the following instructions.

QR stands for – QUICK RESPONSE

QR Codes can hold information such as url’s, text, GEO coordinates, phone numbers, SMS etc. These codes are beginning to be used in a whole range of environments today eg shop front displays, catalogues, libraries on business cards and much more.

For information on how to read these codes I suggest clicking on the following link and this will take you directly to Jeanette Davies Oliver library support page.

Jeanette has provided a range of links to suitable apps that enable you to be able to read these QR codes from both Mac computers and mobile learning devices eg iPhone ipads.

One of my favourite QR generators is     http://delivr.com/qr-code-generator

My favourite QR readers for iPhone or ipod touch is QR Reader or Qrafter (both are free apps)

Click on the image below to go to Jeanette’s Library support blog for further info on QR codes.

Here is a link to a wonderful blog entry and links to a QR CODE TREASURE HUNT GENERATOR

Scootle is now integrating with the Australian Curriculum.
You can now browse curriculum content descriptions, find Australian Curriculum aligned resources and create your own collaborative workspaces and learning paths.

Click here to read more about these new features and Australian Curriculum Connect

If your school has not registered for SCOOTLE as yet -  Click here to access information on how to do so.

1. Take a few photos with your iphone, digital camera, laptop etc

2. Import them into iPhoto and create a new album – if you want text slides in thie movie, go into word or keynote and create the text. You can either take a snapshot of this text – using Shift-command-4  OR you can export the page as a jpeg

3. Select a theme for the slideshow – and the music. Then export

You can easily upload videos to your Posterous blog via email. Posterous will accept avi, mp4 and mov formats. If you are emailing through the CEO mail this will only allow files up to 4MB.

If you do wish to be able to upload larger files here is a tip.

1. Create a  gmail account
2. Register with posterous adding this new email address (possibly change username slightly)
3. Login to your existing posterous account and add your new username and email to this account. In settings enter the permissions as a ‘administrator’.
Gmail will allow you to upload videos up to 25MB

Try this and feedback to the blog any successes or problems.