Resources for Digital Learning at the Secondary Level

Today’s Food for Thought

Livemocha

Livemocha is a first of its kind web based language learning solution integrating online instructional content with a global community of language learners. It uses a social networking interface to connect native speakers to individuals learning a new language. There is a nice flashcard tool for learning vocabulary in just about any language.

Livemocha also has full courses available for a fee in English, Spanish, French, Hindi, German, and Mandarin Chinese.  There are also crash courses for travelers.

Annenberg’s Interactives

This resource contains interactive lessons for grades K-12 in these areas: Math, Science, Language, History and the Arts.

“Interactives” provides educators and students with strategies, content, and activities that can enhance and improve students’ skills in a variety of curricular areas.

Each topic includes information followed by an interactive quiz.  Check it out!

Wordle

Wordle is a great tool to work with at all levels and subjects to create word clouds of important vocabulary or important words to illustrate content or important events. It was created by IBM Research Senior Software Engineer, Jonathan Feinberg.  You literally can get a pictorial implication of some text by pasting it into Wordle. Here’s the description from the Wordle site:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Click below to hear an interview with Jonathan Feinberg:

can_i_have_a_wordle_with_you

Here’s a Wordle I created using part of the text of a poem by James Russell Lowell titled Vision of Sir Launfal.  It’s title is “What is so rare as a day in June?”