Making the Thesaurus Cool

The more I use Twitter, the more I LOVE it and it's not because I can tweet my friends. Frankly, only one of my friends is on it. No, I love Twitter because of the thousands of teachers that are on it sharing ideas and resources. Today's resource comes from Free Tech For Teachers, but Richard Byrne said he got this tool from the Twitterverse.

Called Lekipedia this tool works as a dictionary and a thesaurus all rolled into one. Type in a word, and a mindweb pops up with related words. Hover over one of the words and a definition pops up. This tool would be fantastic for anyone doing some writing, for students working on their English skills or just for someone needing a quick dictionary.

Great Tools for Research

Today's post is all about research. I have one general tool and one specific to advertising.

First the general tool. I just learned about this today, but I can't wait to show it to kids! Navify is a search tool that pulls articles from Wikipedia, related photos from Flikr and related videos from YouTube. I tested it with a search on Pearl Harbor, just to see what would come up. Sure enough, a good article about Pearl Harbor today, and its history, all kinds of photos (current and historic) and a slew of videos, including film of the bombing, a clip of Roosevelt's "This Day Shall Live in Infamy" speech, and a clip of John Belushi rallying the troops with his "Did we give up when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor." Good stuff.

The advertising link is to Coloribus. Coloribus is an online archive of advertising from all over the world. Again, good stuff!

Web Pages Made Easy

Web2 is a handy tool for quickly converting files into web pages. It's free (although your new web page will have some advertising)) and you do not need to sign up. You simply upload your file, click the conversion button and voila! You have an unique URL that you can share with anyone. It's a basic tool, and you have little control over the design of the page but this would be a very handy thing for students who are just looking to get some content onto the web.

An End to Advertising (mostly)

Tidy Read is a nifty add on for IE, Safari or Firefox that cleans advertising off of webpages and then pops the content up in a nice, clean window. The cool thing is that when the content pops up, the font is nice and BIG, so that it's really easy for, um, experienced eyes to read! It doesn't block all ads on some sites, but it sure makes a lot of sites easier to read.

This add-on could be a nice tool to use in schools where we try not to link to sites that do have advertising.

So Many Tools, So Little Time!

Web 2.0: Cool Tools for Schools is a very extensive list of Web 2 tools and applications. One thing I like about it is that it's alphabetical, so you can quickly find something if you know the name of it. There are hundreds of links here, to all kinds of tools. There's also a category list, which is helpful if you don't know the name of a site or if you know what kind of tool you need.

This wiki could be a black hole for time, though. There are so many tools on this wiki, that you could spend days clicking on links and exploring them!

Have a piece of Timetoast

Thanks again to Free Tech For Teachers, I found a really neat timeline maker, called Timetoast. Timetoast allows you to add detailed descriptions of events, graphics and links. Just think of the possibilities! In art, create a timeline of the evolution of modern art with pictures of the major artists or works and links to museums where the work resides. In literature, follow the travels of a character and include a Google Earth virtual tour. So many possibilities!

Give Timetoast a try. It's free.

Free Music Archive

One of the things that Ed Tech Coordinators and librarians struggle with is getting students and teachers to at least try to abide by copyright and fair use rules. Everyone wants to use music in their videos, podcasts and slideshows, but finding good-quality copyright free music is difficult. Now, you can use the Free Music Archive The FMA has many different genres, and music is curated by a number of people involved in community radio, including Seattle's own KEXP.

Be forewarned: Some lyrics are objectionable in content so this may not be appropriate for middle school and younger students.