Using Wordle

Hi all,

I've taken up John and Anne's call to contribute and help make this a teacher's site by teachers for teachers. This is my first ever entry to a blog so please go easy on me if it doesn't work out quite as planned. Hopefully the ease I have with making this entry will encourage more of you to do the same.

http://www.wordle.net/ is a great online application 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.

You can use them to highlight key points from a given topic, such as this one on Presentations:

You can also create "wordles" of phrases by adding " ~ " between each word you input, such as this one for telephoning phrases:

I recently got my students to create their own word clouds on telephoning phrases for homework. Not surprisingly, they all did it!

You can also create a word cloud of an entire website. The higher the frequency of words on the site the larger they will appear in the word cloud. Here's one I just made by inputting the url of this blog:

Once you've created your word cloud, choose the print option and then save it to your computer as a pdf file before printing. This way you'll have the file saved locally and can then email it to your students, print it out or bring it to class on a laptop / USB stick (if you have such facilities to teach with). They're really great fun and really easy to make.

Have fun!

Turn text upside down

˙ʇı "dılɟ" puɐ lɯʇɥ˙dılɟ/ɯoɔ˙pɐɟʌǝɹ˙ʍʍʍ//:dʇʇɥ pǝllɐɔ ǝʇıs ɐ oʇ oƃ uɐɔ noʎ 'uʍop ǝpısdn ʇxǝʇ uɹnʇ puɐ unɟ ǝʌɐɥ oʇ ʇuɐʍ noʎ ɟı

Once again the right way around:

If you want to have fun and turn text upside down, you can go to a site called http://www.revfad.com/flip.html and "flip" it. The typeface is not perfect, because it's bottom aligned, but just think of all the fun you could have with it. What is special about this particular tool is that you can also use it in email, in a comment to Ask Auntie Web, in a forum, in your blog, ... in short, pretty much anywhere you can copy and paste text online.

Tweeted by britzel.

Using symbols

Have you got a German keyboard and find you sometimes have to type a £ or ¥ sign?

If you are using Word or Outlook, you can always click on 'Insert', then the menu point 'Symbol' and scroll through all the characters there until you come to the one you need or you can use ASCII code (an acronym for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange) which is often much faster if you have to use a special symbol frequently. If you want to use the pound sign, for example, hold down the Alt key and press 156 (or 0163) and, hey presto, the pound symbol should appear: £
You can also assign your own shortcut key to a specific symbol, e.g. Alt + P for the pound symbol. I use Word 2003 and the screen to do that is found under 'Insert' ---> 'Symbol'
Select the symbol you want to create a shortkey for, click on the 'Shortcut Key...' button at the bottom of the screen and then assign a combination of keys to generate the symbol automatically in future. NB.
Do not use a combination of keys that have already been assigned as shortcut keys, e.g. Ctrl + Y (which is normally used to redo or repeat an action).