SimpleNote as a Web Page

Well, the Year 12 Lit students have had their last class and are now firmly in revision and study mode (I hope!)

However, that’s not quite the end of it. There’s nearly ten days until the Lit exam so I’ve scheduled three online meetings in the evening next week to have a last chance to discuss the text and answer any questions. Session 1 is to be on Frankenstein, session 2 on Hamlet and the final session on Gwen Harwood’s poetry.

I’ve setup online meetings like this for the last couple of years using the Adobe Connect software, which the school has a licence for. You can try it for free for three users HERE.  Last year the first session had only about six students, but as word spread that it was actually useful by the final session I had most of the class online, which was great. I hogged the microphone and turned the video off, and the central window was a big chat where they could ask questions and answer each others questions. The hardest thing in the end was getting them off the site at the end. They wanted to keep talking!

I also meet students individually in that last week and try to get them to book in times I’ve put aside. This year I’m using the great little iphone app SimpleNote to put up the schedule as an ultra simple web page.  I simply keep the text file updated on my PC or my Ipod and the web pages is updated online. You can see how it looks HERE. I could have used a wiki for this, of course, but for a quick and easy web page I couldn’t imagine anything much simpler.

Frankenstein Word Cloud

And, just to compare with the last post, and because I’ve done it for my students, here’s a word cloud of some key passages from Frankenstein, that I used with my Lit students. Note the word in the centre – ‘monster’ – but who is the monster here?

Wordle (for looking at text)

Wordle is a great little online tool that creates beautiful tag clouds out of any text you paste in. And it copes pretty well with a LOT of text. Here’s one of the opening letters from Mary Shelley’s Franksentein, which I’ve been teaching this year, in terms of the key words. Wordle gives more prominence to words that recur a lot in the text, so it’s suddenly become a useful tool in terms of helping students analyse and uncover the big ideas in the text. I love the big ICE at the bottom!

Only trouble is that Wordle has no export function, so you’ll have to use some kind of print screen or screen capture tool (we love JING) to snip the word cloud you create.

Iphone Study Guides

I’m teaching Year 12 VCE Literature this year so I’ll probably focus a bit on that in some of these posts. I was interested to see the range of Education applications emerging on the Iphone/Ipod platform and available through the Itunes store.  No better or worse than ye olde study notes from Wizz or whoever, but maybe handier, and more appealing to whatever generation we’re currently up to!