Electric Chalk

Because everyone learns from everyone else
November 19, 2008

Gaming in Education - update

Gaming - By: Chris
Tags:

Thought I’d draw your attention to this to widen your gaming horizons.

Had a comment from Dan Livingstone at the Learning Games blog (go there now, it’s good!) helpfully directing me to Derek Robertson’s Consolarium pages at Learning and Teaching Scotland.

Cheers Dan.

Rating 3.00 out of 5
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November 18, 2008

New to digital video? - Start here!

Media, Site of the Week, Video Resource - By: Chris
Tags:

A wee while ago the Guardian newspaper did one of their excellent little guides to making video. I had a paper copy but just came across it online here.

If you are about to venture into the murky world of digital video you could do a lot worse than start here. There are a bunch of very accessible articles on a wide range of issues.

Particularly good are:

Also, check out:

Hope you find it useful…

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November 14, 2008

Online Calculator.

Web Tools, resources - By: Online-Stopwatch
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Online-Stopwatch.com has “hijacked” :-) Electric Chalk to tell you all about a new the new web app – Online-Calculator 

Still in Beta, we welcome any emails, suggestions, or features you would like to see.
  
New calculators will be added to the site soon – such as a scientific calculator, and many more.
 

If you have any comments about Online-Calculator.com please leave them below. Just click the “Give us your thoughts!” link, or email us on:

Online Stopwatch Contact

Thanks!

Rating 4.33 out of 5
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November 11, 2008

Wordle.net - Text Analysis Tool

Literacy, Site of the Week, Web Tools, resources - By: Chris
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Just came across this on Martin Weller’s excellent Ed Techie blog.

You cut and paste a piece of text or put in the URL for a website that has a RSS or Atom feed and it generates a cloud of the most used words (excluding the really common ones like prepositions and articles). It’s a bit like the tag cloud you get on blogs but for a whole body of text.

It would be an excellent reflective tool for essay writing or analysing a body of poetry, maybe also as a starting point for creative writing.

Just as an example, here’s what you get if you put the Electric Chalk URL into Wordle (click thumbnail to see full size)…

Interestingly, the word “education” doesn’t figure as much as “PDA’s”. Think I’d better stop ranting about them!

Some issues - The Safari browser I’m using doesn’t like the Java application so try IE or Firefox. Also, when embedding the HTML it needs to be all on one line, not as published on the Wordle site which has line breaks.

Rating 4.00 out of 5
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November 10, 2008

Independent on Mobile Learning

comment, equipment, mobile learning - By: Chris
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Have just read this article from the UK Independent paper.

KEEP UP!!

To claim that PDA’s are about to transform education is something that could have come from an article 3 years ago. I had to double check the year on the article.

They quite obviously haven’t for a number of reasons but PDA’s as a technology are dying a long, slow agonising death. Who would buy a PDA now, anyway? It’s all about smartphones and iPhones. PDA’s are expensive, difficult to use (thanks to Windows Mobile) and decidedly not sexy. Why should a school forkout  thousands of pounds to equip their students with soon-to-be-obsolete technology?

I can forgive the Indie this one discretion - probably wooed (as my boss pointed out) by a well timed press release from Wolverhampton. 

What is more disappointing is that I found it through a link from the BETT show website, THE premiere education technology show in the UK.

Come on, chaps. You’re supposed to be showcasing the future!

 

 (NOTE: Damn, can’t find the seminar page that linked to it now but it definitely was there!!)

Rating 3.00 out of 5
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