Group items tagged

"Text 2 Mind Map is a web application that converts texts to mind maps. It takes a structured list of words or sentences, interprets it, and draws a mind map out of them" (description below working display, above Hints for using it).

Coiro, Julie. (2005). Making sense of online text. Educational Leadership 62(2), 30-35. Retrieved September 21, 2011, from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/oct05/vol63/num02/Making-Sense-of-Online-Text.aspx

Reprinted from the Academic Author newsletter of the Text and Academic Author Association

This excerpt (Israel, 2012, Ch. 5) mentions abuses and tedium of slide presentations, as well as advantages of, and strategies for supplementing talks with slide shows.

Chelsea Lee explains, "The formatting of the titles of sources you use in your paper depends on two factors: (a) the independence of the source (stands alone vs. part of a greater whole) and (b) the location of the title (in the text of the paper vs. in the reference list entry)" (¶2), then charts and exemplifies the variants.

"Wordle is a toy for generating "word clouds" from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like." Might try to run student essays thru this.

"To realize the promise of virtual collaboration, leaders and collaborators alike ... need to learn to think strategically and critically about the most appropriate ways to choose tools, adapt processes and work in virtual spaces" (text box between ¶¶ 4 & 5).

Univ. of Southampton's evaluation of a "Web 2.0 Service" offers a brief description and assessments from three perspectives: 1) accessibility, 2) disability-tailoring, and 3) activities for which Type with Me is useful, namely: a) Group Discussion; b) Text-based Editable Information [compilation], c) Note Taking, and d)Collaborative Writing.

Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus has launched an innovative new tool called VocabGrabber (http://vocabgrabber.com) that helps teachers and students target the key vocabulary from a text within seconds. Powered by the award-winning Visual Thesaurus software, VocabGrabber intelligently extracts words from any document and demonstrates how those words are used in context. It's a boon for language arts teachers, students of English at all levels of proficiency, or anyone who wants fresh insights into how language works. VocabGrabber is easy to use. Simply copy a passage (up to about 100 pages) into a box on the VocabGrabber web site (http://vocabgrabber.com), click the Grab Vocabulary button, and an interactive visualization of vocabulary words and phrases immediately appears. Or add a VocabGrabber button to your toolbar, and you can grab vocabulary words from a web page with one click. What makes VocabGrabber especially useful is the way in which the words are organized. VocabGrabber compares how often words appear in the text with the frequency of these words in standard written English overall. Grabbing the vocabulary from the United States Bill of Rights, for instance, highlights significant legal terms like probable cause and cruel and unusual punishment. Grabbing the opening of the Charles Dickens classic Oliver Twist, meanwhile, will quickly zero in on words like workhouse, gruel, and pauper.

Easy to use tool for speed reading practice, with bookmarklet that automatically opens spreeder with any text you've selected in your browser

"You can export your members' profile information at any time from the Manage Members page This will generate a comma-separated (CSV) text file that you can open using a program like Excel. It'll contain information about your members, including their name on your Ning Network, a link to their profile page, their email address, the date they joined, their birthday, and their answers to all of the profile questions on your Ning Network."

"The Academic Word List (AWL) was developed by Averil Coxhead at the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. The list contains 570 word families which were selected because they appear with great frequency in a broad range of academic texts. The list does not include words that are in the most frequent 2000 words of English (the General Service List), thus making it specific to academic contexts. The AWL was primarily made so that it could be used by teachers as part of a programme preparing learners for tertiary level study or used by students working alone to learn the words most needed to study at colleges and universities." This page gives a compact listing of all the word families in the AWL, divided by sublist, each word linked to a simple definition page.

Explanations and examples of in-text citations

The first tool listed lets you also put in text and get a percentage count

"...[I]n most cases, online plagiarism checkers act as better wrappers to deliver the results from a search engine" (Google, ¶1).

Explains automated optical character recognition as it applies to image files uploaded to Google Docs

"Though Crusan (2010), Ericsson and Haswell (2006), and Shermis and Burstein (2003) offered a more thorough treatment of machine scoring in general, in this article, I concentrate on one program―MY Access! (Vantage Learning, 2007)―briefly describing it and discussing a small study conducted in a graduate writing assessment seminar at a midsize Midwestern university in which graduate students examined second language writers' attitudes about using the program as a feedback and assessment tool for their writing in a sheltered ESL writing class" (¶2).

Delcore, Tenient-Matson, and Mullooly (2014) used findings from this study to delineate an on-campus space-use continuum that can be used for planning and renovating IT-related facilities, infrastructures, and services.

Morris has compiled "ten tips for making your blog posts easier to read" (¶6).