Wordle - beautiful words

Another site for making content more interesting, put simply you can paste any text you want to and the Wordle site will generate an image with the words arranged as a word cloud. Words that appear more often are shown in a bigger font. See below for an example of a Wordle made from a short passage from a Midsummers night dream:

You have complete control of fonts, colours and layout directions or you can simply click 'randomize' until you find a combination you like.

It's particularly good for collections of definitions. It isn't a 'magic bullet' but it is a useful addition to a collection of approaches for a teacher trying to make content varied and interesting.

Presenting Prezi

Every so often you come across a web 2.0 site that is really special, Prezi is one such site. It lets you produce eye catching presentations that are much more interesting to look at than PowerPoint. Presentations are set on a huge canvas that you move around as you add content. You can zoom in as well as zoom out as you move between the elements of the presentation. The effect is difficult to describe but students love it.

Coca Cola Company on Prezi

The interface for creating your Prezi is one of the most intuitive that I've ever come across. It has loads of features (too many to list here). Trust me and take a look, you won't be disappointed. http://www.prezi.com

I'll have a 'P' please Bob..

Sometime ago I wrote an educational quiz in PowerPoint based on a well known quiz in the 80's (those of us of a certain age will remember it well..). Anyway the other day I rediscovered it...It really was rather good.. You can download a copy here.

What I liked about my solution is that the questions are typed into the Notes section and then the game board was built dynamically from the first letters of the questions. When a 'cell' is cicked the question is displayed, click it again and the cell turns blue, again and it turns yellow. In this way student teams have to attempt to build a solid line of colour from edge to edge. This means that it can be easily adapted for any number of quizzes.