Category Web2.0

Feb 28 2010

Word It Out

If you like using Wordle; another website that allows you to make word clouds is Word It Out.

Simply enter some text and create your word cloud. You can then share your cloud if you want to. It is also possible to embed it on your blog or website.

Note that just as you can with Wordle you can use the tilde (~) character to keep words together.
A great feature for mathematicians – WordItOut can easily cope with the equals sign, division signs also – see for example this equation.  (It is possible to use the equals sign in Wordle – use Advanced).
It seems other symbols are possible also.

Various options are available, you can change the colours of your words and the background colour, you can also change the size of the font and the variation in size allowed.

Emma made our Year 7 class a poster of the vocabulary needed for our work on shapes and here is a very simple example on Linear Sequences.

Feb 6 2010

Spelling City

Spelling City  allows Teachers to easily create spelling tests for students, this is free of charge; upgrades are possible but the basic free service is excellent. It is now even more useful as teachers can add their own sentences to define /describe a word. Students could create their own tests, all free and no registration required.

For example – can you spell words associated with triangles and quadrilaterals?

The UK GCSE specifications for teaching from September 2010 include marks for quality of written communication.
Some questions will include marks for this; to quote AQA:

‘Candidates will be expected to use correct spelling, punctuation and grammar in any explanations they are asked to provide.’