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Make Phonics Fun The Word Cub Letters & Sounds app from Learning Cube takes the alphabet blocks that children treasure and gives them new life on an iPhone or iPod Touch. The app helps young children learn letter names and sounds and recognize directionality and blending. Adjust the settings and the blocks display either uppercase or lowercase letters. The words all use short vowels. Select the consonant blends for the initial sounds and the task gets a bit more difficult. With a left-to-right sweep of the finger, children can hear how letter-sounds blend to create a word. The app is available in the Apple iTunes App Store for $1.99. 

In a move that will make primary-source documents more accessible for students, Caroline Kennedy unveiled the nation's first online presidential archive on Jan. 13, a $10 million project to digitize the most important papers, photographs, and recordings of President John F. Kennedy's days in office. Users can browse through the drafts of Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you" speech and see how he tinkered with the words of that most famous line from his inauguration. Or, they can listen to his personal phone calls and read his letters. Archivists digitized more than 200,000 pages, 1,200 recordings, and 300 museum artifacts, as well as reels of film and hundreds of photographs. Library Director Tom Putnam said they started with all of Kennedy's Oval Office files-everything that went across his desk-along with his personal papers, official White House photos, audio of all his public remarks, video of his famous speeches, and home movies. Private partners-including AT&T, EMC Corp., Raytheon Co., and Iron Mountain Corp.-contributed $6.5 million in equipment and technical services to digitize thousands of records. The library will continue digitizing about 100,000 pages a year, along with thousands of photos and recordings. At that rate, it would still take more than 100 years to digitize all records from the Kennedy administration

a game designed for K and 1 students to practice early literacy and phonemic awareness skills. Students drag letters into a sequence to make the word featured on the screen. There are two levels, beginner and advanced. With the beginner level, students have less choices and with the advanced level students have the entire alphabet from which to choose. 

"Tagxedo turns words -- famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters -- into a visually stunning tag cloud, words individually sized appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurrence within the body of text."

word clouds with style! Neat!