The first week of ICT on my PGCE course has now happened. We kicked off with a look at a few utilities that might be useful as teaching aids.
Hot Potatoes is a suite of educational tools that let you generate web-based crosswords, word searches, quizzes and so forth. Judging from some of the feedback from the web it's quite highly regarded by teachers. It seems to be abandonware since 2009 though, so the UI feels very dated and the whole package is lacking in modern refinements we've rapidly come to expect. Still, there doesn't appear to be anything else available that could be a suitable replacement.
Would I use it? Probably not. Undergraduate-age students are at that point where they've discovered their independence so solving a word maze might be seen as beneath them. Ironically, once you get to post-graduate ages you're more likely to find use for the tools as mature students have that bit more maturity so as not to scoff.
Hot Potatoes
http://hotpot.uvic.ca/Hot Potatoes is a suite of educational tools that let you generate web-based crosswords, word searches, quizzes and so forth. Judging from some of the feedback from the web it's quite highly regarded by teachers. It seems to be abandonware since 2009 though, so the UI feels very dated and the whole package is lacking in modern refinements we've rapidly come to expect. Still, there doesn't appear to be anything else available that could be a suitable replacement.
Would I use it? Probably not. Undergraduate-age students are at that point where they've discovered their independence so solving a word maze might be seen as beneath them. Ironically, once you get to post-graduate ages you're more likely to find use for the tools as mature students have that bit more maturity so as not to scoff.
Internet Detective
A single-purpose website, the Internet Detective is meant to raise awareness of the need to scrutinise the web as a research source. It takes the form of turn-by-turn tutorial that covers areas such as the need to critically evaluate multiple sources on the web and how to identify the most reliable sources. It is another resource that seems to be abandoned - the site last saw any updates in 2009 and the majority of the embedded resources are dead links. It does serve as a starting point for discussion though and could at least be the foundation for a more up-to-date class session.
Wordle
Finally we took a look at creating word clouds, specifically using Wordle. It's the most popular tool of its kind (though they really need to update with a non-Java version if they want to remain relevant) and has a pretty reasonable set of features to customise things. Word clouds are one of those things that have good use cases but are often shoehorned into all kinds of inappropriate places. They're great at showing the relative popularity of topics but not so good as a form of navigation.
To give it a go I uploaded the entire text of my MSc major project report, some 25,000 words, to see what it made of it. Here's the result:
There's a few words in there that maybe shouldn't be. All the 'Candy' terms are the title of the project so don't need to be there. Also the word 'figure' is only prominent because of the number of image captions littered throughout. After a bit of find-and-replace I re-uploaded it to get:
That's pretty representative of the whole document, I'd say. Interesting point is the word 'although', which I'm aware I use a bit too frequently, although it is a nice word.
http://www.edudemic.com/9-word-cloud-generators-that-arent-wordle/
To give it a go I uploaded the entire text of my MSc major project report, some 25,000 words, to see what it made of it. Here's the result:
http://www.edudemic.com/9-word-cloud-generators-that-arent-wordle/
Comments
Post a Comment