Wordle (Blog #8)

Wordle is an application that let's you copy and paste text into a box and creates you a word cloud with the most common words in the text the largest and decreasingly common words in smaller sizes. Wordle is a free site enables you to create beautiful word clouds that relay information in such a positive light!

Wordle would be absolutely wonderful to use in my classroom as a teacher! Being able to give the students information based on how many times words are used in a text would really be able to show them what aspects are really important in the notes I give or the information that I send out. Wordle also makes the information much more significant and to be quite honest prettier. As a not only a teacher, but a special education teacher it would help my students learn the information but also let my students see the information in a format that is more aesthetically pleasing to them

and their learning styles. I could definitely see myself using Wordle in instances where we might read stories and then be trying to dissect the most important parts. Wordle would be wonderful in helping my students figure out what the most important aspects of the story were, because it puts the size of the words in numerical order, so students would have an easier time seeing the important parts!   

 

Above is a Wordle I created on an article I read on Autism. 

Open Source Software (Blog # 6)

Open Source Software is a type of software that is produced solely by collaborative effort. Instead of creating software and charging a ridiculously high amount for it along with withholding the program codes like large software corporations do, open source software is online and open for anyone to use and tweak for their own personal use. Because of the fact that anyone can tweak open source software no one really owns the rights to it, which makes it good for people on a budget. Having no price or very little price placed on such software enables people to have access to high quality software on a tight budget.

This type of high quality software at low or no cost is extremely advantageous for offices and especially schools in the current economy. Schools have faced budget cut after budget cut and no longer have the budget to provide teachers with such software but because of open source software teachers now have the ability to go online and get some of this open source software for free! Instead of having to dish out hundreds of their own dollars on software to large companies. 

Here is a YouTube Video that gives a wide range of free open source software available online! It also explains what some of them are and gives real people's opinion's on them and how well they work!