Creating a Blog for Educational Purposes

This weekend I am working with a group of elementary teachers offering professional development in the use of technology for educational purposes. One of the goals is to help them in the creation of a blog that they will use for education purposes. It will also be used as a way of establishing and maintaining both a learning community and a space for dialogue to be use with students and parents. Today we worked on creating electronic instructional modules with MS Power Point. Tomorrow we will be working with blogs and next Saturday we will be working with the creation of an online course using Edu 2.0. I will keep you posted on how it goes.

Wordle

I am currently a participant at the NYU Faculty Resource Network Seminar, New Technologies for Teaching and Learning. We started on Monday, June 13 and will end Friday, June 17. We have covered many topics and today we are playing with Wordle, an online application that will enable you to create word clouds. This is an open source program and the product is really cool. I will include an example of the Wordle that resulted from my seminar notes up to now. It helps us see the themes that were covered in my notes. Students can similarly use this tool to take a close look at their writing and see the themes they have covered in their writing.