T3- Image Mashups and Generators

These are something I am less familiar with, and actually find pretty neat. Of course, in the long run, they are just fluff to content. However, they are a great way to get attention and a quick and easy way to create visual aids. So... they could be very important fluff :)

These can be used to be eye-catching elements in projects. Playing with ImageChef, and trying to get it to arrange text in a useful pattern, it also makes a strong point as to the benefit of the human intelligence over an artificial one. Using to long of a quote or poem creates gibberish. Trying to use a quote from Thoreau proved to be rather unsuccessful, due to how it tries to position letters based on fitting it within the desired shape over have the content actually be meaningful.

Would be an interesting way to introduce a typography project for art or multi-media... which is a project I had already considered...


Lyrics from Bernard Fanning's Wish You Well
Song we listened to each morning in Aussieland

Comic Strip Generator has some issues. The first concern I had was the chat room on the bottom. Some of the live chat isn't appropriate, and despite the fun theme of the page, this isn't really a site I think we could use with the kids. We'd have to find another site with out the chatroom. Furthermore, trying to actually create a comic, some of the comics are blocked altogether, where as some of them just load up as little red x's.

flickriver a wonderful search engine for images. Unlike google images or yahoo images the images it brings up are all of great quality. Press J on your keyboard after doing a search to enter a 'slideshow' mode. Contine to press J to move on to the next photo, press k to go back to the previous. Some amazing shots when searching Australia.



via Spell with Flickr; too cool. The images are affected by the style scripts of the blog though... if your blog's style is to put frames around all your pictures, thats exactly what will happen. You can see the borders around the letters above, which is built into the template for my blog- while the effect normally looks nice on the other images, it detracts a bit from the effect of spell with flickr in my opinion :(

Wordle creates some pretty nifty images as well. With a bit of play, its easy to make some pretty neat images. Although it can be a bit time consuming figuring out how to get them them to turn out the way you'd like.

Word It Out does basically the same thing, with just a few little differences here and there. WordSift appears to let you construct your own once you paste in some text, hit sift, and then open a workspace.

Majority of these sorts of applications, despite being highly amusing, have too much variability and spontaneity. Majority of these seem mainly useful in creating visual aids to keep a viewers attention, but seem to have little practical application for actually furthering knowledge in most areas. It would be difficult to show how the majority actually further a student's understanding of a project they used these tools for. While I enjoyed playing with Wordle above, did I really learn anything more about Alice in Wonderland by tinkering with Wordle? This is not to say they are without purpose. It all depends on how its implemented. An educator needs to access the tool, just like any thing else used during class time to ensure it and its use is beneficial. This is also, of course, not a comprehensive list of these sorts of things, but rather just opens the door as to what is out there that can increase interest our lead to potential growth in different content.

Glogster, on the other hand, seems to have a myriad of obvious uses. It can effectively be a use of technology to replace the poster board projects. Using glogster could be seen as a greener alternative to poster-board projects. It could also be a useful way to create 'rough-drafts' of poster projects, a sort of 'digital mock-up', before a student would beginning a physical poster. This could help students ensure success and ensure instructors would receive hopefully more polished and professional work than without it. Many of the glog's on the website are not impressive, and it would be important for the instructor to gather a few examples of what they are looking for before releasing the students on a Glogster project, regardless of the purpose of the project or activity. Although there are flaws with them here or there, I did feel these were some of the stronger ones I saw.

-Allen Ginsberg
-Global Studies: Genocide
-Book of a Thousand Days
-Learning about UDL