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Moodle at kevinryan |
Google has done it again. I really like all the neat things they come up with. This one is great for expanding your vocabulary and finding related concepts. It is called Wonder Wheel. On the regular search page, near the top, click on Options, and then choose Wheel in the left-hand menu. It works like the Visual Thesaurus, but is free.  Wonder Wheel for linking concepts Google Translate has added new features making it a lot easier to use. For those of us in Japan, the best one is “romanization” which allows you to get the pronunciation through roman letters of the kanji in question. Read more about it at Mashable. Here is a video that shows the new features. I finally emptied by inbox, the holy grail of GTD (Getting Things Done, a book by David Allen). GTD is a system of organizing and dealing with incoming information. Most of that information for me is in the form of email. A great implementation of the system in software is the GTDInbox, a free Firefox add-on that really works well. It was, therefore, funny, today, to get an error message for GTD, presumably because my inbox was empty! UPDATE! A nice GTDInbox employee pointed out this was a problem with my web access, not with GTDInbox.  Error message for GTDinbox Kurt Vonnegut is in my top 3 writers. Here are 8 reasons why. From the entry in Wikipedia.
Last week was banned books week. All over the world, books are continually banned for their content. At this Interactive map of banned books, you can find out which books were challenged at school and in libraries all over the US and Canada. It would be great to do a version of this for Japan.  Banned Books Interactive  Modern Language Association From Ars Technica. Seems that even the conservative MLA sees the writing on the wall. No longer are books the standard for making a bibliography entry. Now you have to say which kind of media. Also, other arguments about how to quote a web page.
David Wiley thinks that the university as it stands will be irrelevant by 2020. He suggested we take a look at a couple of videos. Here is one of them. Will Richardson over at Web-logg-ed has a very interesting article about how new technology will change how we read. He points us toward an article in the Wall Street Journal by Steven Johnson, one of my favorite writers. Johnson talks about how the eBook will change reading, primarily through its ease of use, immediate access to an entire library, and linked information and sharing your thoughts in an ongoing discussion with friends and strangers. This linking and discussion takes place using web sites like diigo, or digg, or evernote. Annotating, marking up, adding comments in the “margins”, tagging and sharing. I think he is spot on. I can’t wait to get my Kindle.  ShowaELC Logo Showa ELC, or English Language and Communication, is our unofficial department website for students and community building. I’ll be posting any further tools for students over there, and tools for teachers here. I’ll be maintaining that web site too, so keep a look out for new stuff there. Set up your News Reader to get both this site and that one. You won’t be sorry. This ends the 100 Tools in 100 Days. I’ll continue posting ideas and tools here, but add other topics like Japan, social life, economics and politics as well. I hope you have enjoyed these tools and will use some of them. I certainly will.  Scrolling messages in a .gif picture Some of you will end up making web pages for your students. This will liven up any message you have to send to them, such as a warning about a deadline or important information they need to see. It is called a screed. Try it, it only takes about 30 seconds to make one, then just save it to your computer and use it like any regular picture. |
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