Wednesday 28 April 2010
Tuesday 27 April 2010
Bits and Bobs
Anagramarma
I have been trawling through a pen drive given to me last year from RSC and JISC, such has been the year that I have only got around to it today!! And stumbled across an application called Anagramarama - which being a free download is right up my street basically it gives you &letters and a clock ticking and you have to make as many words as possible from three letters all the way to the 7 letter anagram. The time ticks by and solves the entire puzzle. From an ICT point of view and pedagogoy, the program is self generating so that evan an ICT novice can use it, one drawback is that you don't appear to have any control over the anagram itself, so it would be limited to reinforce subject specific vocabulary, however from a primary point of view it can be used to discuss vocabulary and discuss the words that the program founfd that the pupils did not. Also you could use it as a starter excercise with adult learners especially those with english as another language.
Another of the applications I have rec ently been playing with is Dspeech. DSpeech is a text-to-speech program with the option of saving the output as a WAV or MP3 file, which is great for creating audio books from text sources. It also supports dynamically changing the features of the voices eg. insert pauses, emphasize specific words, spell them out etc. using tags. You can get a portable freeware version. Now this is where it can become really useful because in todays age of costs you do not have to either buy it or download it to the computer you are using, all you have to do is download it to a flash/pen drive and you can use it from there. Now the drawbacks, the voice is very mechanical and robotic in sound, however you do have the optuin I believe, but you would need to check it out - to record using your own voice. so why not use Audacity, well with this program you have the text written in the program, so providing the project is saved it is possible to go back and amend/ edit the text and build a new WAV file. this would especially be useful for special needs, for those dyslexics, or those who have speech problems, or even just those who have inner speech problems. Work used in a word processor can be copied and pasted into the program and the program can read it back to the pupil. The only thing is the caliber of the voice. However, I am sure there will be developments here.
I have been trawling through a pen drive given to me last year from RSC and JISC, such has been the year that I have only got around to it today!! And stumbled across an application called Anagramarama - which being a free download is right up my street basically it gives you &letters and a clock ticking and you have to make as many words as possible from three letters all the way to the 7 letter anagram. The time ticks by and solves the entire puzzle. From an ICT point of view and pedagogoy, the program is self generating so that evan an ICT novice can use it, one drawback is that you don't appear to have any control over the anagram itself, so it would be limited to reinforce subject specific vocabulary, however from a primary point of view it can be used to discuss vocabulary and discuss the words that the program founfd that the pupils did not. Also you could use it as a starter excercise with adult learners especially those with english as another language.
Another of the applications I have rec ently been playing with is Dspeech. DSpeech is a text-to-speech program with the option of saving the output as a WAV or MP3 file, which is great for creating audio books from text sources. It also supports dynamically changing the features of the voices eg. insert pauses, emphasize specific words, spell them out etc. using tags. You can get a portable freeware version. Now this is where it can become really useful because in todays age of costs you do not have to either buy it or download it to the computer you are using, all you have to do is download it to a flash/pen drive and you can use it from there. Now the drawbacks, the voice is very mechanical and robotic in sound, however you do have the optuin I believe, but you would need to check it out - to record using your own voice. so why not use Audacity, well with this program you have the text written in the program, so providing the project is saved it is possible to go back and amend/ edit the text and build a new WAV file. this would especially be useful for special needs, for those dyslexics, or those who have speech problems, or even just those who have inner speech problems. Work used in a word processor can be copied and pasted into the program and the program can read it back to the pupil. The only thing is the caliber of the voice. However, I am sure there will be developments here.
Tuesday 20 April 2010
Delicious
Delicious is a social bookmarking site (http://delicious.com/), it is free to register and keeps all your interesting websites under one bundle. what is more you can 'tag' them. This means that you can attach a tag or number of tags to the web address. What is the point of that, well you can catogorise your sites. from a teaching perspective this means you can share sites easily with students. Further because you can put a number of tags to the site it means you haven't got to share all your sites with all your students, but you can discriminate and share the appropriate sites to the appropriate people. My colleague Mandy has been using the site for a while now, and whilst you can set up a network and allow access to selected people - a bit like a wiki I suppose, the way she operates is that she encourages all her students to register the site - its free and it means they can start building a list of their subject websites. once registered you can view all the popular website, or just your own, you can also search tags. this means that if you get into tagging the sites, not only with a tag that will identify what the site is about but also with a tag specific to the course, e.g. its course id number then when searching the students can find the websites specific to their requirements.
It can take a little while to set up, especially if you have lists of websites, say in a word document, but when you are on the sites it is really easy and the tagging system is only a matter of a couple of extra clicks. You must be logged in to Delicous, however if not you will be prompted as you tag your site. I have added Delicious to my IE8 toolbar and if I come across a website that I think is of use, simply click the site and add the tag, the site is then added to your list!! So simple, no need to flick from site to site or copy we addressess and paste in on a different page.
The beauty of the site is that it is simple and easy to use, when operations are uncomplicated there are far more incentives to use them!!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)