Senior Plans

Here is our "Senior Plans" display wall. Thanks to fellow librarians who like to share their great ideas.

The Twitter Experiment

A US History teacher from the Univ of Texas at Dallas uses Twitter with her students.



The conclusions to the Twitter experiment:

http://www.utdallas.edu/~mrankin/usweb/twitterconclusions.htm

Google New Search Options Feature

Google has just launched a new "search options" feature. After you do a search, click on the "Show Options" link. You can filter your results by type (videos, forums, reviews) You can also filter by time. A Wonder Wheel view visually maps related topics. This video explains how it works.

VocabGrabber

Another tool similiar to WordSift is VocabGrabber which is a Visual Thesarus that will generate interactive vocabulary list from text. Grab the text from a speech, poem or story. VocabGrabber will sort the vocabulary words by subject. Hover over the vocab words to find the definition of the word. Click on the link and give it a try.

Another new tool - WordSift

WordSift is a visualization tool that helps you sift easily through text. It identifies important words that appear in the text.

WordSift's description page lists the following features:

1. Tag Cloud. A Tag Cloud of the 50 most frequent words in the text, excluding function words (such as is, of, at, the).
2.Visual Thesaurus®. The most frequent word is entered into the Visual Thesaurus® and the result is displayed as a word web.
3.Google Image and Video Searches. The results of Google searches are also displayed, using the two most frequent words as the search terms.
4. Sample Sentences. Examples from the source text containing the most frequent word in the text is displayed under the Visual Thesaurus word web.
5. Tailoring the Results. The WordSift display can be tailored by clicking on any of the words in the Tag Cloud. That word will be entered into the Visual Thesaurus, the Google Images and Video searches, and also the sample sentences.