Pure Manaʻo

It's the end of the school year and the classroom clean up is the only thing holding us back from driving off into summer, but fall will come soon enough and if you want to change up the decor in your classroom, Poster-Street.com is a free source for cute posters that can downloaded as pdfs or embedded on your classroom webpage or blog. The categories of posters they have are: office, home, teacher, kid, and teen. I'm constantly looking for teen stuff and they're a bit too cutesy, but still, FREE and easy to use. Besides downloading the posters, you can share it on twitter, facebook, delicious and email. One more poster for the heck of it:

"Infographics are 30 to 40 times more likely to be viewed and shared than text."  I think that's especially true for our students who live in a world saturated by visual stimulants vying to grab our attention. It's not enough to have billboards lining the highways. Now it's animated billboards. It's no wonder that our textbooks and newspapers are filled with colorful infographics. It's how we read. As a genre, infographics challenge creators to synthesize information and visually depict the information in a catchy, yet logical fashion. It's hard, but it's still a worthy skill to have students practice. easel.ly , although still in beta form, and very limited in its templates is a nice site that allows students to play with data using pre-made templates. The teacher would of course need to have a conversation with students on the purpose of each of the templates, and it's by no means perfect for all content areas, but check it out, it's...

Saw this on a tweet and decided to try it with our 6th grade Hawaiian studies readings. Check it out. Start here .  You'll get the screen below. I then went to grab some text from the Hawaiian Studies curriculum. This particular one is from the book on Kamehameha V: Lot Kapuāiwa, Introduction Chapter 1, pages 1-3. I put it into the VocabGrabber and here's what I got. A couple things I noticed: The list of 37 words on the bottom left are set up like a wordle, so the ability to bring out themes and important words is already built in. It gives you an example from the text which helps when doing a literary critique because you have possible citations. There are visual connections with the main word as the  piko  or the center (see screenshot below with the word unify) Yes, it does cost money if you want to create a word list or do more with it, but there is a 14-day free trial offer, and on their "educators" page on the menu bar, they give lots of tips o...