Here are a few exceptional blogs exploring the frontiers of education technology.

Moving at the Speed of Creativity

EdTechTalk

Teach42

2 Cents Worth

How can the Visual Thesaurus help students better understand the language of mathematics?

In this lesson, small groups of students will use the Visual Thesaurus to explore the multiple meanings of some common math terms. Then, groups will synthesize this knowledge by coming up with examples of the words in both mathematical and other contexts. Continue reading...

The other day, my two teenage sons cajoled me into watching a movie they both find tremendously amusing. The film is not new. It's called Kangaroo Jack, and features Christopher Walken playing a small-time thug named Sal. Although Sal is the head of a bumbling crime family, he feels very insecure about his word knowledge, and throughout the film he is seen making a desperate attempt at self-improvement through the use of a tape-recorded vocabulary tutorial. In my favorite scene, a soothing female voice on Sal's tape player defines the word amorphous — having no shape or form, and then directs Sal to use the word in a sentence. Sal responds with this beauty: "After Joey Clams got whacked, his head was amorphous." Continue reading...

How can the Visual Thesaurus help students replace trite words of emphasis with "words strong in themselves"? Continue reading...

Okay, y'all, last month's column wore me out. So I turned off the interweb, rested my mouse-clickin' hand, and took a nap with Julie Andrews' wonderful memoir, Home, on my chest. Now, as I promised, I'm back with more resources to help teachers get their students to grasp literature through historical context. Continue reading...

In this lesson, students identify the algorithm behind Fibonacci's sequence of numbers and then read a New York Times article about how blogger Gregory K. Pincus invented a poetry form based on this number sequence. Students then synthesize their knowledge of the Fibonacci sequence and the VT to create their own "Word Fib" poems that explore the multiple connotations of some challenging one-syllable vocabulary words. Continue reading...