Cool Tools Holiday Edition

Just in time for Christmas and the end of the semester, when you'll have a little time to play around with new technology over break, it seems like the perfect moment for a round of Cool Tools -- nifty technology you can use to make your work and home life fun.

You may remember Wordle from the presentation at in-service. It's the online "toy" that lets you take any text and turn it into a word cloud that illustrates which words are used most frequently. Here's an example I made of Twas the Night Before Christmas done as a Wordle. (Just a note: if you browse the gallery you will necessarily observe the tendency of people to use any tool of this sort to broadcast obscenities in big letters...) If you'd like ideas of how you might incorporate Wordle into your work, take a look at this list in The Clever Sheep, or this one at Ask Dr. Kirk (which offers suggestions that reflect a workplace rather than the classroom).

Draw Anywhere is an online graphics program that you can log into from anywhere to access your flowcharts and diagrams. Rather than storing, saving and transfering files, you can share them with others over the internet and access them publicly. You can also link charts or diagrams to your web page and then change them as needed with minimal effort or enable others to make changes to them. While you can get a free account that enables full functionality but limits user access, output and security, real flexibility comes from the $30/year account.

GoogleNewsTimeline is a new Google App that lets you manipulate various elements of Google's news features to create a timeline of recent events. You can, for example, put in the name of an important individual, such as the president, and have it highlight news stories for him over time. A great way to follow how rapidly changing stories develop, or to see how particular countries appear in the news.

For something truly on the fun side, play around with Voki, an avatar generator that lets you create animated avatars that speak. You can get the code to publish an avatar to your web page to introduce yourself to your students in a fun way as an anime character or have them use them to record foreign language or vocabulary practice.

And what may be one of the most broadly useful applications, Glogster, lets users create online posters that can incorporate multimedia elements. The "glogs" can then be incorporated into blogs or wikis. The Glogster site offers several examples of the kinds of things that are possible with the tool. Students can create an online poster session, or you can create posters to attractively illustrate key concepts or ideas.

During spring in-service, the library will offer faculty and staff an opportunity to learn how to create and use wikis. This session will take place during the Faculty prep time so keep an eye out for further details. Wikis are one of the simplest and yet most powerful and effective tools available. They are perfect for creating collectively developed work of any sort, from class group projects to quick answer manuals for dealing with those questions people in your department must respond to frequently and you want to make sure everyone knows what the current information is. They are an ideal software for teams to use to develop ideas as well, as changes are recorded. Here is a good video from CommonCraft on TeacherTube that explains the concept of wikis in a fun way.