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Here is a description of Contextu via Richard Byrne's Free Technology For Teachers posting: Ken Halla, the blogger behind the US History Teachers Blog, has been working on an excellent new site for students of US History. The new site is called Contextu and its purpose is to help students see the greater context for significant events in history. The first iteration of Contextu is focused on the American Civil War. On Contextu students select from a table of contents an event, piece of legislation, or theme to see it in the context of other events, pieces of legislation, and themes leading to the start of the Civil War. Through timelines, Google Maps, diagrams, flow charts, timelines, and text Contextu provides context for each chosen event, piece of legislation, or theme. Students can jump from event to event or from theme to theme by following the hyperlinks within each diagram.

Retailers and marketers often face the challenge of getting coupons, offers and promotions delivered at the perfect time and in the right context to their customers. The rapid advances in cyber foraging, contextual computing and cloud computing platforms are succeeding at revolutionizing this aspect of the retail shopping experience. Context-aware advertising platforms and strategies can also provide precise audience and segment-based messaging directly to customers while they are in the store or retail outlet.

The site claims that it will address 10 times more mistakes than a word processor including contextual spelling errors and poor vocabulary usage. Where was this grammar resource site/tool when I was having to write so many papers in college? Now this will be a great option to go right along with hemingwayapp.com for reviewing my blog posts. Time to share this with my staff and students!

I saw this bookmark on Vicki Davis' blog. This is a terrific resources for all teachers to use to contextualize the 21st century and help students understand their place in this world.

"Surphace connects your current articles to contextually relevant content from your archives as well as from Blog Posts, Media Articles, Video, Photos, and Ads from across the Web."

These two powerful questions framed a recent webinar presented by Professor David Perkins of Harvard Graduate School of Education's Project Zero. Answering these questions and helping teachers find meaningful and contextually relevant answers to these questions has been a focus of Perkins' work, especially in recent times. His book "Future Wise: Educating Our Children for a Changing World" introduced us to the notion of lifeworthy learning or that which is "likely to matter in the lives our learners are likely to live". This is a powerful notion and one that has the potential to change not only what we teach but also how we go about teaching what we do.

Jenn Dorman provides Google tools for schools to: Create, Collaborate, Communicate and Contextualize.

Build vocabulary using games

A few years ago I was taking a tour of a dome shaped house, and the architect explained to me that domes are an optical illusion. Whenever someone enters a room, their eyes inadvertently glance up at the corners of the room to give them the contextual dimensions of the space they're in.