Easy Tweets is a cool website that I have found out lately.The website finds interesting and real tweets at your language level easy, medium, or difficult. It uses the word lists from Cambridge University’s English Vocabulary Profile project which lists more than 15,000 of the most common English words, ranked by difficulty level.  Go to the website, choose easy/medium or difficult, then write the keyword that you would like to find tweets about, then you can enjoy reading the tweets. If you think that a tweet is inappropriate, click on the flag and it will be deleted forever. This tool can be used with upper levels and that’s great for teachers if you are looking for and using authentic materials in your classes. Picture Source: ShutterStock

I love word clouds! And Wordle is certainly a long time favorite of mine. Here is another word cloud generator if you are interested! You can copy and paste text or you can enter a URL to see the word cloud of the website. It’s a great first day introduction tool. You can create your own word cloud about you and show it to your students to make guesses or make them create their word clouds about their feelings or themselves. Picture Source: Shutterstock

Sound of text is an online text-to-speech tool that allows you to listen and download the MP3 audio from Google translate. Without signing up, simply type what you would like to hear, up to 100 characters. After hitting the submit button, you will be able to listen to what you have written in many languages. This simple tool is a great way to practice speaking and writing in different languages, as well it will help us and our kids to practice spelling and pronunciation.   Picture Source: ShutterStock  

Here is a simple and a very effective tool that we can use with our learners. Meet ShortText. ShortText allows you post text online, with minimum fuss. You can also insert a picture and a video into your post as well. When you’re done, simply click on the create URL button to get your online page. You don’t need to sign up or sign in and this is what makes this tool more powerful to use with our students.  You can also make your post private and allow comments which make interaction better. The only con is that once you publish your text, you won’t be able to edit it. You will have to create another page. It also has a Chrome extension and a Firefox Add-on that will make it easier to post for us. This tool is great for instant blogging, writing an essay, creating party invitations, provide information on any topic, creative writing with a picture or a video, creating your one page website. Hope you and your students enjoy! Picture Source: Shutterstock  

Wheel Decide is a web tool that will help you to make choices in your classroom easier. It lets you write your own choices and the wheel will show you the choices that you have written. Then, you can spin the wheel and you will get one of the choices that you have written. This tool can be used as a student selector. Write your students’ names and find a random student to answer your questions or to present in the class. Instead of writing the student names, we can write some target words that we want to study with our students. We can play spelling games, sentence formation or hot seat games. We can also write questions for kids to answer and they can work in pairs and answer the question that they have read. Thanks to Yasemin Bayraktar for this cool tool! We learn everyday from each other! Picture Source: ShutterStock  

This is just a quick post to say that I have put together a couple of instructional pages on how to use the Track Changes and Comment features in Pages (Mac) when doing collaborative writing work in class. At the end of the instructions, there is an editing and proofreading checklist for children to use as part of this process. I would try to embed the code but I think it won’t work so well due to the size of the window, so here is the link to where I have uploaded this to Scribd. Feel free to use this in any way you like if it is useful to you. Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

With John Key (NZ’s prime minister for those overseas) at last agreeing to go to the Copenhagen summit on climate change, my mind turned to the resource I had small part in creating for TakingITGloblal’s education section. The ‘Tread Lightly Toolkit’ looks at historical cases of the impact of man on the environment, the current issues for the planet in relation to climate change, and a challenge for students to reduce their own ecological footprint. The purpose of the resource as stated in the kit is to help young people worldwide to: Understand the basic science of climate change and how human activity is contributing to the problem. Realise the dangers of living beyond the earth’s carrying capacity. Understand how climate change and other environmental issues are interconnected. Foster a sense of personal and collective responsibility towards the earth. Identify and adopt eco-friendly skills, behaviours and attitudes. Become more interested in climate change policy at local, national and international levels. It is well produced with useful resources. I helped to create the handouts on the historical examples but this is just one small part of a very comprehensive resource. Check it out at: http://store.takingitglobal.org/files/treadlightly/TL-Teacher-Toolkit.pdf

What is Wall Wisher? Wall Wisher is an online Web 2.0 application that allows someone that has signed up for an account (free) to create a digital wall.  Once given the URL of the wall, a number of users can simultaneously post virtual sticky notes to the wall making it a great tool for gathering contributions during a brainstorming session. A big advantage is that the users do not need to have accounts themselves to post a sticky note so it is quick and easy to use in a group situation. Sticky notes can contain up to 160 characters and can include hyperlinks to other sites. Multimedia that is hosted online on other sites, such as images, videos and sound files, can also be added to a sticky note by using the URL. Once a wall has been created, you can also embed the wall in other online spaces such as wiki pages or blog posts. How can you use Wall Wisher in your classroom? This simple yet effective tool has a number of classroom applications. Here is a list of some ideas to get you started. Use Wall Wisher to: brainstorm knowledge about a topic before beginning a study brainstorm key questions to investigate during a study summarise key learning points about a topic after a study collect student feedback on a lesson have students collect feedback from their peers on the work they have completed create ‘to do lists’ link to online resources for a given topic link to work that students have completed that is available online create a multimedia space for a topic where students can view videos and images or listen to sound files as well as add their own brainstorm ideas on how to deal with issues that have arisen in the classroom have students document how they are demonstrating the key competencies To see Wall Wisher in action and add your own ideas to the ones above, visit the wall set up at this address: http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/interface Example of Wall Wisher How does Wall Wisher work? Visit http://wallwisher.com and sign up for a free account. Click on ‘Build a wall’ at the top right of the screen. You will then be given a number of options for your wall. You need to add a title, subtitle and image for your wall.  You also need to choose the end of the URL for the wall and decide who will be able to leave sticky notes on the wall. Once you have completed all of those steps, click on ‘Done’ in the bottom right of the screen. The wall will be created and you will be sent an email containing the URL of the wall to give out to other people. To add a sticky note, users need to double click anywhere on the wall.  You can type up to 140 characters into a sticky note. You can also add an image, audio track or video link by pasting in the URL of where these are hosted online.When you have finished adding your content to the sticky note,  need to click on ‘OK’ on the bottom right corner of the sticky note to ensure the note is visible to others and remains on the wall. Close up of a sticky note.

First impressions count! Combine poor theme choice with a cluttered sidebar and you have a recipe for convincing first time visitors NOT to subscribe to your blog.  They’re too busy being turned off to notice your great posts! Unfortunately sidebar clutter creeps up on most bloggers.  So I thought it would be helpful to share the process I regularly use to declutter my sidebar. Prioritizing SideBar Decluttering What I do is take a critical look at my design in the following order of priority (which also reflects their location in my sidebars): How obvious is it for readers on how to subscribe to my blog? Feedburner RSS subscription - Is it prominent? Feedburner Email subscription - Is it obvious? How easy is it to find information on my blog? Search widget - Is it prominent & near top of blog sidebar? (I prefer a search that only search my blog) Categories and tags - Are they helping readers easily find relevant information? What other widgets do I have in my sidebar?  Which ones can I live without? — if you compare this blog with The Edublogger you will notice a difference in number of widgets in the sidebars. Tip: If you want to display Archives on your blog sidebar it is better to use a drop down menu as it takes up less room. Editing Categories Unfortunately my categories failed this latest audit in terms of "Are they helping readers easily find relevant information?" - so I changed too many messy categories (21 categories on this blog) to fewer, more relevant categories (10 categories). Off course editing each post on this blog (300 posts) and The Edublogger (100 posts) to fix categories was thoroughly excruciating enjoyable. NOTE: Refer to this post to learn about the difference between categories and tags. My tip for speeding up the process is to hold the Ctrl key when you left mouse click on the title on the post in your blog dashboard — this opens up the post so you can edit it in a new tab (for FireFox, Flock and Internet Explorer 7).  This open up 15 posts in 15 separate tabs and work through the task faster! FINAL THOUGHTS Would love to hear your priorities in using widgets on your sidebar especially in terms of what are your ‘must have’ widgets and why? This was part of the Day 8 Task for Building a Better Blog. Image adapted from John Pannell licensed under Creative Commons ShareAlike. And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider Subscribing for free!

Unfortunately it is very easy to misinterpret and/or mis-use any type of statistics. People often look at the number while failing to consider how the statistic was calculated or what it truly means. About Misinterpreting Statistics Here’s an example: Statistics show that 45% of the population can’t read the newspaper. Shocking literacy rates! Or is it? How many included in that statistic were too young to read, didn’t speak English, had some form of disability etc? What percentage of the entire population was sampled, what method was used, did the method bias the result etc? Using Statistics in Blogging So where am I going with this? Well bloggers love statistics and they love to know how they rank against other bloggers. Since Technorati authority is no longer reliable bloggers have looked at other options. So some bloggers are using PostRank. For example, here are the top blogs on education based on their ranking by PostRank. Trouble is bloggers are looking at the statistics and the number 1-10; not considering how it was calculated, how blogs are ranked against each other using PostRank or what these numbers mean. Effective use of PostRank Let me be clear! I love PostRank. It is an incredibly valuable tool for quickly analyzing and comparing all of your blog posts in terms of number of: Comments Bookmarked (Delicious, diigo etc) Twittered Linked to All of which helps you reflect how the different post types impact how readers engage with the posts. For example, if your aim is a long informative post you would expect few comments but hopefully lots of bookmarking and/or linking. PostRank helps you work out if you achieved this goal. Misinterpreting PostRank But if you are using PostRank to compared your blog’s performance against another blog, or identify the best blogs for a topic than you need to look more closely at their statistics. In particular look at those eye icons that represent views. What do they mean? Well they are the number of your readers that click the post title in the PostRank widget in your sidebar. Should high clicking on the PostRank widget in a sidebar make a post (and blog) high ranking? Below is a screenshot from PostRank. The example on the left is a perfect 10 from another blogger (educational) whose rank on that post is entirely based on click on the PostRank widget. While The Edublogger post had high bookmarking, linking and comments. And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider Subscribing for free!