Study Island High Score!

5th Grader Jeremy Steidinger made the Illinois state high score table for place value of whole numbers. His score of 5,880 put him 5th out of all 5th graders in the state that have completed the game so far. Great job!

Blabberize

Friday seems like a good day to share this tool. It's called Blabberize, and at first glance, I know it looks silly. The site is incredibly easy to use. Upload a picture, place a mouth on the picture (or multiple mouths if you want), record a sound and you're done! Click my pal to the left to see what I'm talking about.

I challenge you to think about what can actually be done with this tool. Students can create reports in the first person and then "blabberize" them into a relevant picture. Teachers can create "special guests" to introduce a new topic. I'm sure that there are many more possibilities. What can you do with it?

Taxgedo

Here's a Web 2.0 tool that I highly recommend.  Perhaps you have heard of Wordle, which allows you to create word clouds from a body of text.  Taxgedo takes this concept a step farther by allowing you to apply these word clouds into specific shapes.  I made the one you see in this post using the text of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

An important thing to remember about both Taxgedo and Wordle is that words most used in the text appear largest in the word cloud.  Therefore these word clouds are not only a creative display, but can help students analyse the content of a text.  I foresee a number of great uses for this tool, if you have some good examples leave a comment!