Clouds *sighs*

I love visualisations, particularly wordy ones. I love how this nice little service produces charming word clouds. Here are the contents of my blog:



Cute, huh?

Playing with literacy - using the fourth r

One of the greatest strengths, I think, of using Web 2.0 technologies in teaching is that there are so many great ways to link words and images together to make meaning. Many students at my school really struggle with writing and reading, and these tools provide a stimulating way of students creating (and internalising) their own learning.

I played round today with two tools from pimpampum - bubblr and phrasr.

The first atomic models

Scientific models

I'm going to get my students to play with these two and make their own, to consolidate their learning.

Every teacher is a literacy teacher

Apparently, science teachers are the only teachers that take this seriously. Of course, that was the opinion of one person, but I think I can say that my department, at least, takes literacy seriously.

I think, in our case, it's self-defence. We have an awful lot of specialist vocabulary and are so dependent on analogies and models that we need to be really proactive in teaching students how to read and interpret texts, how to read and interpret images, and how to construct their own meanings from texts and images.

That's one of the reasons I love visualisations like wordles, love visual dictionaries, and adore talking books online. But today, we did a classic collage with scissors and glue, with my Y11 class making analogies for cell structures. Another time, I would probably do this using online tools. Today, though, it was nice to get our fingers a bit dirty. And my students came up with some lovely analogies - like centipede legs for pili and baleen (as in whales) for the cell membrane.

Four computers per classroom

In my ideal world, I would have a class set of laptops. Failing that, having a pod of four computers at the back of the classroom is still pretty awesome.

Four computers is enough that students who finish early can use them to do extension work - like the students in my class today who are playing Fantastic Contraption because they finished their work and did not need to go back and revise earlier work. Four computers is enough - just - that groups can use it for a stations activity, with the other stations being paper-based.

But four computers is not enough when you want students to use online resources to create something new - a presentation or a poster or a video or whatever.

I'm really lucky. The class I tried this with first - Y9 science - is always on at the same time as only one other class. That means I can spread my 24 students around 12 computers across three classrooms. It works - but it's not ideal. When students have a question to ask me or hit a snag, they have to come and find me. It relies on students being able to work unsupervised in empty classrooms - or be trusted not to disrupt the learning in occupied classrooms. I am still not sure of the long-term value of having just four computers in my classroom, but I'm not giving up on making it work yet.

Oh, and since I'm here, here's a link to the wordle that one group made: They are so pleased with themselves.

The images we associate with science

So, today, as my Y9s finished their collaborative, open-book assessment. One of the first ones to finish helped me make the image to the left - I asked her to help me choose images that captured the idea of science.

We used the Big Huge Lab's flickr site to build the mosaic using images we found on flickr.

Isn't it awesome?

I have to find a way to use this in class, because it is Just. That. Great.

Also, I did have the html that would take you to flickr so you could see who took those amazing photos... but then IE crashed and I lost it. Thanks, Microsoft. So, if you stumble over this, I am so, so, sorry that I cannot correctly attribute the creative genius of the photographers.

Key words for e-learning

I'm a huge fan of wordle. There is something so satisfying about seeing keywords visualised in this way. I particularly like this one - I love how the words learning, create and interact dominate the image.