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I came across Wordle some time ago, thought it was pretty nifty, and then forgot about it. An article in the August 2009 issue of Learning & Leading with Technology ("Words in a Cloud" by Samantha Morra) made me reflect on the power of this fun tool. In the article, Morra describes using Wordle with her middle school students to visually analyze important documents, such as the Declaration of Independence. I began thinking about science and math class and wondered if the tool might help students identify the main concepts of a passage. However, I don't have access to any middle school textbooks to test this out!

If you want to use it as a pre-reading activity, copy and paste your text (or type a few paragraphs) into wordle to create the word cloud. The size of the words indicates the frequency of their use in the text. In essence, major concepts/terms will show up bigger than others. Have students create a prediction about the reading based on what appears in the word cloud.

If you want to use it as a post-reading activity, I have had students keep a running list of words that jump out at them while reading a particular passage (or you can give them a more specific purpose for selecting words). Then, they create their own word clouds. It's a nice formative assessment for teachers to see what students are noticing while reading (or NOT noticing...).

In a 2007 report, the American Association of Colleges and Universities recommended strongly that emerging technologies be employed by students in order for them to gain experience in “research, experimentation, problem-based learning, and other forms of creative work,” particularly in their chosen fields of study.

New scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching continue to emerge but appropriate metrics for evaluating them increasingly and far too often lag behind. Citation-based metrics, to pick one example, are hard to apply to research based in social media. New forms of peer review and approval, such as reader ratings, inclusion in and mention by influential blogs, tagging, incoming links, and retweeting, are arising from the natural actions of the global community of educators, with increasingly relevant and interesting results. These forms of scholarly corroboration are not yet well understood by mainstream faculty and academic decision makers, creating a gap between what is possible and what is acceptable.

despite the widespread agreement on its importance, training in digital literacy skills and techniques is rare in teacher education programs. In higher education, formal training is virtually non-existent.

Make it a class project to collaboratively write a reference book that others can use.

sk students to create study guides for a specific part of the unit you’re

Get your class to create a glossary of terms they use and learn about in new units, adding definitions and images.

ouTube, Google, Stanford, Berkeley, and the California School for the Deaf (CSD) are about to speak on YouTube and accessibility.

Now the Google Speech Technology team is speaking about the challenges they faced to get auto-captioning operational. Their vision was to create accurate captions for all videos in all languages, but had to deal with huge vocabularies, background noise, poor recordings, accent variability, and distinguishing between song and speech.- Google’s approach is to deliver captions from the cloud, given them the ability to rapidly iterate and model at a large scale.

You can only caption your own videos — you can’t just caption someone else’s videos.

are people confusing talking to people online with deep, connected learning? Does being part of a social networking site or a NING community mean you are going deep- growing  in your ability to co-construct or deconstruct knowledge? Does it mean you are collaborating if you post, reply to a post, Tweet, or engage in a #edchat conversation? Are we moving toward an acceptance of superficiality as a replacement for deep learning? Has our multiple choice  culture trained our brains to believe that innovation is the holy grail?

If all I do is network I do not shift or grow because I am missing the opportunity to go deep and actually learn by doing. It takes both: Networks and Community. Online, global communities of practice and f2f learning communities in my local context.

Imagine the deep learning that can be produced when we come together in learning communities and do some of the following (below).