I love new ideas and technology! Given how quickly the world is changing I thought I give you two new ideas or tools you can use in your classrooms to improve thinking and to create novelty in your sessions.

Wordle (http://www.wordle.net/)

Wordle is a tool for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like.

It is a great tool to hightlight the importance of certain ideas and words that may be used in a text or even in a discussion. For example, the wordle below was one I generated by entering my blog url in and the Wordle program generated the word cloud to highlight the most frequently used words.

The following is a wordle I use in my inquiry programs of what teachers say are the most important 21st century skills

Xtranormal (http://www.xtranormal.com/)

Xtranormal.com is a web-site powered by Xtranormal’s text-to-movie™ platform—a web-based application used to create short 3D animated movies from simple text-based movie-scripts.
If you can type, you can make movies.  The characters in the movie speak the dialogue in the script, and react to performance triggers—icons that are dropped directly into the script, just like smileys in IM/chat.
Movies can be shared through e-mail, blogs and online video sharing and social networking sites such as YouTube™, MySpace™ and Facebook™.

Have a go … they are both fabulously easy to use!