reflection on blogging in the classroom

Whatever you don don't let the students use their personal emails. They make up ridiculus names like: sandy_sexybaby487_robins@hotmail.com or Paul_badarsed_MOFO_the_DJ_blasterman_58932@hotmail.com. And if that's not bad enough they write it down wrong and you end up with an error message or it has never worked and they never check that particular email.

The best way is to get a list of their sensible school emails and set the blogs up yourself so that you know that they work.

I will be doing it the second way now after trying the first way.

Visual wordmap dictionary

Here is an incredible tool that can be used in the classroom. It's called Visuwords and its a sort of graphical dictionary come definition map. All you do is punch in the word and search and it will come up with a map of all the definitions, parts of speech and their relationships. The map is colour coded so it's easy for visual learners to see how the same word can have different meanings depending on its context within the sentence.

web.2 identity

Our VCE English context is Identy and Belonging. I am putting together a folio of images so that students can get a visual representation of the context and to bounce some ideas around about Identity and Belonging as well as for visual writing prompts. I thought these two images are relevant to our students who are usually pretty web.2 savy.

wordle tutorial

This is the easiest way to create a wordmap great for analysing themes, characters, setting, ideas in any novel or word-based text. Try it with Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Just cut and past the text in. Here is an example from Chapter One.
title="Wordle: Chapter One Nineteen Eighty-Four"> src="http://www.wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/912962/Chapter_One_Nineteen_Eighty-Four"
alt="Wordle: Chapter One Nineteen Eighty-Four"
style="padding:4px;border:1px solid #ddd">© 2009 Jonathan Feinberg Terms of Use subscribe

What you do is copy the text in the box then press 'go' and then save it to a public gallery and then you can either print it out or if you want to but it on a blog or website just embed the html code.