A return trip to the SWGfl Regional ICT Conference held at The University of the West of England. The conference was entitled “Expanding Horizons”.

As ever, a SUPERB and professionally organised event with some inspiring speakers. The opening keynote was delivered by our dear friend Andy Hutt. Andy’s talk was titled “Reasons to be Cheerful” looking at the way that new tools can be used in and out of the classroom to make lessons more engaging and life a bit easier.

Typically, And delivered his presentation in a warm and human, realistic and experience based style. Certainly a reason to be cheerful in his own right.

Today we, too, looked at the power of blogging and other “web2.0″ technologies.

I am very grateful to Ed Sherwin, of St Joseph’s Catholic Primary school, Fishponds in Bristol, for sharing some of his experiences with blogging, since our visit to help them set it up more than a year ago.

 

Have a look at their regularly updated and well maintained blog, and see the power of pupils discovering a world wide audience.

I have written a couple of articles on blogging and podcasting, originally published in The Junior Education Magazine, which you can find here:

Blogging

Podcasting

On the subject of expanding horizons, Voicethread has a huge potential when it comes to getting students to work collaboratively, across any boundary.

An interesting use of Voicethread HERE and a Wiki HERE.

Mark Warner’s Ideas to Inspire site includes some interesting ways of using Wikis and Voicethread.

Many of us have been playing around with and exploring the huge potential of Wordle.

Children we have worked with, have found it valuable to try many ways of visualizing their creativity and it has sparked some great discussions around the world of words.

<—–Some encouraging results when we asked it to visualize the blog.

Have a look at Tom Barrett’s “Thirty-two Interesting Ways to use Wordle in the Classroom“.

Well done indeed to Kenji Hakuta and Greg Wientjes of Stanford University for stretching the idea of word links and the imaging of word clouds to a different level.

WordSift is a tool that was created primarily for teachers. Mainly, think of it playfully – as a toy in a linguistic playground that is available to instantly capture and display the vocabulary structure of texts, and to help create an opportunity to talk about, and play with, language.

WordSift helps anyone easily …sift (!) through texts — just cut and paste any text into WordSift and a whole array of ways of looking at text appear.

In some ways it takes the Google Wonder Wheel, in Google Options as we looked at HERE… and makes it roll.

Stretch vocabulary and searches like a visual thesaurus of ideas. I love it!

The program helps to quickly identify important words that appear in the text. This function is widely available in various Tag Cloud programs on the web, and in Wordle, but WordSift integrates it with a few other functions, such as visualization of word relationships and Google searches of images and videos. With just a click on any word in the Tag Cloud, the program displays instances of sentences in which that word is used in the text.

It is in no way as beautiful as the images created by Wordle, but it could be said that the potential for exploring words goes a whole lot further beyond that, allowing exploring and wandering through the world of words and heading off on tangents.

“WordSift also allows users to see relationships among words. Want to help students understand difficult-to-define academic words such as analyze? Show students synonyms of this word from within WordSift, using the Visual Thesaurus®. The Visual Thesaurus acts like a thesaurus-cum-dictionary with brilliant graphics. For word geeks and psycholinguists, this is a lot of intrinsic fun. But for teachers, it is a great way of talking about vocabulary — not as boring lists of definitions to be memorized, but as a web of relationships with other words — a veritable social network of words”.

Wordsift integrates with the The Visual Thesaurus’ hugely powerful VocabGrabber. Use it through Wordsift and it is free too.

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