Vocab Grabber: an Amazing Online Text Analysis Tool

Try VocabGrabber today! -

IT'S PRETTY AMAZING ...

VocabGrabber analyzes any text you're interested in, generating lists of the most useful vocabulary words and showing you how those words are used in context. Just copy text from a document and paste it into the box, and then click on the "Grab Vocabulary!" button. VocabGrabber will automatically create a list of vocabulary from your text, which you can then sort, filter, and save... read more and try it now now!

I grabbed some text from today's CNN headlines, pasted into VocabGrabber and Voila! CLICK on the image above to see the results OR Try VocabGrabber with one of sites samples:

• United States Bill of Rights
• Oliver Twist: Chapters I and II
• Science Text: What is a Genome?

ATS Picks 01/06/11

1. Web-Design Competition Sparks Collaboration



Discussion Questions
1. How does the ThinkQuest competition benefit students of the Digital Generation?
2. What did you think of the solutions that the team came up with for the eDivide project?
3. How does ThinkQuest facilitate communication and collaboration skills? How can you provide similar experiences for your kids?

2. Scratch as an Animation Tool

Next time you ask your students to make a presentation, consider having them use Scratch to create simple animations. Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web. BB&N students are being introduced to this tool throughout the school. It is offered as an after-school activity in the Lower School by Colm, is taught to the 6th graders by Megan and has been introduced to the 7th graders by Svetlana. If you are interested in creating a Scratch project, please contact your ATS. We are more than happy to work with you and your students. Check out these two scratch projects that were featured on MIT's scratch website:

3. Digital Youth Portrait: Jalen



Discussion Questions
1. Is Jalen typical of kids in your community? Why, or why not?
2. How is Remix World facilitating collaboration and reflection? What are some publicly available online tools that could accomplished the same goals?
3. How does digital media complement Jalen's interest in graphic design?
4. How would you describe the attitude of Jalen's parents about their son's passion for digital media?
5. What skills does Jalen practice or learn through his movie and animation projects? How can projects like this impact the lives of kids?

4. Send us your own pick!!!
If you give us a tool you have been using in your classroom, we would love to feature you in a future ATS Picks blog entry. Please leave a link in the comments box below if you have a technology you would like to share with your colleagues. Thanks!

ATS Picks 12/09/10

1) 50 Fantastic Resources for Educators
The title may say "New Teachers" but all teachers will find this a great place to explore to find websites with exciting content for their classrooms. Organized by grade level, it includes links to teacher networking sites, sites with free lessons, proven educational websites such as Discovery Education and PBS Kids and more.

2) Vocab Sushi: The better way to build your vocabulary

This free site offers free games to help you build your vocabulary. You can specify your skill level and your goals. You can look at words in context, play sentence completion and definition matching games. When you create a free account the site will remember your progress.

3) Grammar Girl
Grammar Girl provides short, friendly tips to improve your writing. Covering the grammar rules and word choice guidelines that can confound even the best writers, Grammar Girl makes complex grammar questions simple with memory tricks to help you recall and apply those troublesome grammar rules. Whether English is your first language or second language, Grammar Girl’s punctuation, style, and business tips will make you a better and more successful writer. Mignon Fogarty is the creator and host of Grammar Girl. Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast.

4) Edutopia Digital Youth Portrait: Luis, 18 years old

1. Is Luis typical of kids in your community? Why, or why not?

2. Luis has a demanding academic schedule but still spends a lot of time online and with community service. Do these activities complement each other? Or do you think he is overextending himself?

3. How is Luis using technology to improve the lives of his family members?

4. How does the Tech Wizards program empower students?

5. How do you think the Lego Robotics program benefits Luis and the kids he works with?

ATS Picks 12/02/10

1) Creative Commons

Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creativity. Creative Commons can help you find photos, music, text, books, educational material, and more that is free to share or build upon utilizing Creative Commons enabled search services.

2) Center for Social Media

The Center for Social Media has created a set of teaching tools for teachers who are interested in teaching their students about fair use. The tools include powerpoints with lecture notes, guidelines for in-class discussions and exercises, assignments and grading rubrics. We hope you'll find them useful!

3) Did These Mashups Use "Fair Use"? You Decide!

In AU Professor Larry Engel's Advanced Documentary Technique class, ten grad students used the "Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video" to try to create "fair use" mashup videos. Take a look at the videos and decide how well (or not) they did!

(An activity from the Center for Social Media)

4) Edutopia Digital Youth Portrait: Nafiza, 18 years old

Discussion Questions

1. Is Nafiza typical of kids in your community? Why, or why not?

2. Is it surprising that Nafiza spends so much time playing video games? Why, or why not?

3. Nafiza uses technology "from the moment she wakes up." Is she over-connected?

4. What skills is Nafiza learning by participating in Global Kids? How is Global Kids changing her worldview?

5. Why do you think kids like Nafiza enjoy virtual worlds like Second Life? Do virtual worlds have any learning potential?

ATS Picks 11/18/10

1) How the US Engages the World with Social Media

An interesting article about the ways the US government is using blogging, Facebook and Twitter to improve our image in the world.

2) Preceden: The easiest way to make a timeline

This free site makes it easy to create your own timelines. They aren't fancy, but they are quick and you can print them out or embed them on another website.

3) Facebook's Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over

This ReadWriteWeb blog post summarizes some of the recent comments made by Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, regarding Facebooks new privacy settings.

4) Edutopia Digital Youth Portrait: Cameron, 11 years old

Discussion Questions

1. Is Cameron typical of kids in your community? Why, or why not?2. How would you describe the attitude of Cameron's parents toward technology and Cameron's interest in digital media?

3. How would you describe the attitude of Cameron's teachers toward technology and Cameron's interest in digital media?

4. What did you think of Cameron's Rewind video? Was this a good use of multimedia for learning? Why, or why not?

5. What would it take to support kids like Cameron at your school? What are the potential challenges?

ATS Picks 11/04/10

The theme of this week's ATS picks is History/Social Studies

1) Online History Games
Playing History is a forum and rating website for over 126 online history-related games for teachers and students alike. The games are compiled and organized by topic, difficulty, general ratings, and much more. The search tool is also very helpful and easy to use when trying to find a specific game. Playing History is also user-friendly, allowing students and teachers to post reviews, scores, and comment on feedback of the website itself. Although not all of the games have consistently high ratings, Playing History is a great place to find educational games online for students to learn more about a particular subject.

2) National Archives Experience: Digital Vaults
The NARA Digital Vaults is an interactive exploration of history that examines thousands of documents, photographs, and pieces of history that have been integrated in a digital format. Upon entering the homepage, the user is given eight random archives to choose from. Clicking on one will give a description and a brief history of that archive, as well as displays a large variety of similar archives. The user has the ability to shuffle, rearrange, collect, and explore archives, as well as search for specific points in history using a keyword search. Although a lack of initial organization or index might seem overwhelming, Digital Vaults is a wonderfully imaginative resource for exploring history in a digitally compiled way.
Sponsored by the National Archives and Records Administration

3) Life Magazine's Civil Rights: Women in the Struggle
Life.com presents a photo gallery of famous women in the struggle for civil rights. Each photo provides a concise description of the importance of each woman, along with links providing more information. Although the collection is not very extensive, each of the fifteen photos provides a unique insight into an important part of a movement that largely goes underrepresented. As far as a general resource, this website is a good start to further student research and understanding, albeit not very comprehensive.

4) EdtechTeacher's Best of History: Games and Animations
The Games and Animations section of EdTechTeacher's Best of History sites is a list of fun history games and animations organized around broad historical periods. Most of these games and animation are aimed at students ages 10-16.

ATS Picks 10/28/10

1. 100+ Google Tricks that will Save you Time in School

Check out these great tips and learn how to use Google to convert units, do a timeline search, search for a specific file type, search for a face, use Google News, study the oceans, and much more.

2. Protecting Reputations Online

This 3 minute video illustrates what happens to information that you share on the web. Common Craft's unique style makes it easy to understand some of the risks of oversharing information Online.

3. True size of Africa

A small contribution in the fight against rampant immappancy by Kai Krause.
 This map makes it very clear how big Africa really is. Be sure to zoom in to get the full picture.

4. Lincoln Middle Schools Students Use Technology to Help Each Other Succeed

Campus Innovation: Kids Teaching Kids

Lincoln Middle School creates an innovative learning environment centered on kids teaching kids. Middle school students create math video lessons and collaborate via a Moodle-powered class website, creating a community of learners. Eric Marcos teaches 6th Grade Mathematics at Lincoln Middle School in Santa Monica, California. He also operates Mathtrain.TV, a site that features math video lessons (a.k.a. mathcasts) created by his students.

ATS Picks 10/14/10

1) The 10 Best Apps for Education
Check out these useful free iPhone apps, including flash cards, book readers, and dictionaries

2) Guess the Google
Improve your search skills with this visual guessing game. You are shown a montage of images and you have to figure out the search term that returned those images before the clock runs out. "It turns the mental activity of searching into a fun, visual and engaging game where people can enjoy the challenge of being the fastest and most efficient at making that connection between search terms and their results."  (see if you can beat Megan's high score of 381... but be careful-it's addictive!)

3) Best of History Web Sites
Best of History Web Sites is an award-winning portal that contains annotated links to over 1200 history web sites as well as links to hundreds of quality K-12 history lesson plans, history teacher guides, history activities, history games, history quizzes, and more.

4) Math Starter of the Day
Presenting a different problem each day, the Math Starter of the Day site can be a fun way to get primary grade students engaged with mathematical puzzles and problems.

ATS Picks 10/8/10

1) Ways to Use Voicethread in the Classroom

The Digital Library is a database of articles about successful VoiceThread projects. Our hope is to create a resource that offers guidance and inspiration for people undertaking new projects.

2) Internet4Classrooms... Helping You Use the Internet Effectively

At this site there are a large number of games that kids can play that help review math, social studies and language arts skills. The games are organized by grade level and the site is very easy to navigate.

3) Sketchcast... a New Way to express yourself

Record a sketch with or without voice. Explain something, have fun, or create art. Then embed the sketch player in your blog or point people to your sketch channel.

4) VocabGrabber- Visual Thesaurus

VocabGrabber analyzes any text you're interested in, generating lists of the most useful vocabulary words and showing you how those words are used in context. Just copy text from a document and paste it into the box, and then click on the "Grab Vocabulary!" button. VocabGrabber will automatically create a list of vocabulary from your text, which you can then sort, filter, and save.

Select any word on the list and you'll see a snapshot of the Visual Thesaurus map and definitions for that word, along with examples of the word in your text. Click on the word map or the highlighted word in the example to see the Visual Thesaurus in action.

ATS Picks 9/30/10

1) Adora Svitak- What Adults Can Learn From Kids.

A prolific short story writer and blogger since age seven, Adora Svitak (now 12) speaks around the United States to adults and children as an advocate for literacy. She was a BLC 2010 presenter. She says the world needs "childish" thinking: bold ideas, wild creativity and especially optimism. Kids' big dreams deserve high expectations, she says, starting with grownups' willingness to learn from children as much as to teach. Also check out her blog.

2) Fun for the Brain

The Fun for the Brain site has engaging games that help elementary students review math facts. A favorite is "Gone Bananas", a Mario Brothers style game.

3) Discovery Education's PuzzleMaker
Puzzlemaker is a puzzle generation tool for teachers, students and parents. Create and print customized word search, criss-cross, math puzzles, and more—using your own word lists.

4) 4Teachers.org
The 4Teachers site has: RubiStar for creating rubrics, NoteStar for note-taking, QuizStar for creating quizzes, etc. Use of the website and its family of education tools is free, but one does have to register, provide valid email address and zip code.

ATS Picks 9/23/10

1. NewsMap's objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. News map also allows to compare the news landscape among several countries, making it possible to differentiate which countries give more coverage to, for example, more national news than international or sports rather than business.

2. Create your own “word clouds” using Wordle.Net The clouds give greater promnence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. As an example, here is: a Word Cloud Analysis of Obama's Inaugural Speech Compared to Bush, Clinton, Reagan and Lincoln's.

3. Jeff Utecht- Moving from Consumer to Producer of Knowledge.

4. Check out this video of Dr. Sameer Hinduja on the effects of cyberbullying.

Dr. Hinduja is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida Atlantic University and Co-Director of the Cyberbullying Research Center. He is a member of the Research Advisory Board for Harvard University's Internet Safety Task Force, and works nationally and internationally with schools, law enforcement, businesses, parents, and adolescents to reduce online victimization and its real-world consequences.