A week's worth of WORD OF THE DAY

This week's WORDs of the DAY are: accountable, brouhaha, philippic, dishevel, mawkish. The challenge: Use them all CORRECTLY in ONE SENTENCE.

AAllen:
My husband accused me of being mawkish after my philippic when I got back to my disheveled home and realized that nobody was held accountable for the brouhaha that took place while I was at work.

CFloros:
I feel accountable for the brouhaha that ensued after my mawkish philippic about the disheveled appearance of too many of our students.

FSmith(modified for publication):
The Principal emerged from his office a bit disheveled and mawkish for the calmer days at his school after the many philippics he had to endure from parents who held him accountable for the brouhaha on Tuesday.

MJones:(TECHNICALLY DISQUALIFED- INCORRECT USE OF PHILIPPIC)
I was quite disheveled, feeling rather mawkish and prepared to begin a philippic attack yesterday as I realized just how fed up I am with the group who refuses to be accountable for their actions and continues to participate in creating a brouhaha in the staff cafeteria.

MEtesten:
The brouhahas of the past week resulted in much wailing and disheveled hair among the students followed by mawkish displays of contrition, as those accountable for said brouhahas endured loud philippics from their deans.

JJarot:
I was held accountable for the brouhaha that my disheveled appearance caused at Rod Blagojevich's mawkish philippic.

DBrown:
The disheveled student mawkishly walked down to the dean's office because he was holding himself accountable for the philippic he made and the brouhaha that ensued.

CThorson(not ONE sentence- but very clever!)
So during the season openers of LOST, a lot has happened. Jack Shepard is holding himself accountable for all the bad things happening to the people back on the island after he spoke with Jeremy Bentham. Jack finally cleaned himself up after his dishevelled self tried to jump off a bridge from this guilt of leaving the other Oceanic survivors behind. Meanwhile, back on the island, the time is skipping and it's making Sawyer so angry that he is throwing a philippic at Dr. Daniel Faraday since he's not explaining it properly. Eventually, the Others captured the remaining survivors and brought them back to their camp. At the camp, there seemed to be a brouhaha since there were a lot of Others hanging around. Faraday was told by Richard Alpert there was an H-Bomb on the Island. Faraday told Richard he would dismantle it, and Richard questioned him thinking he'd go there to activate it. Then, Faraday said he was in love with Charolette Lewis, and he would never hurt her. It was a very mawkish moment. But the best part was that we found out Charles Widmore is an Other!!! Total shocker!

BYanello:
Given my disheveled living style, complete lack of accountability, a mawkish wife, and my boss's constant phillipic, I need a brouhaha!!!

TFox:
Those who delivered the philippic were accountable for the brouhaha that left many disheveled and somewhat mawkish.

LKubik(TECHNICALLY DISQUALIFED- INCORRECT USE OF PHILIPPIC)
I will not be accountable for the brouhaha caused by my philippic response when I saw that someone had disheveled my mawkish Valentine display.

MHolubik(TECHNICALLY DISQUALIFED- INCORRECT USE OF PHILIPPIC)
I am feeling mawkish and me mind is desheveled from all the brouhaha that happened due to the philippic behavior this week, and I feel the students should be held accountable for their actions.

LScanlan(TECHNICALLY DISQUALIFED- INCORRECT USE OF PHILIPPIC)
A mawkish teacher reflects on the students who were held accountable for the philippic language they used during the brouhaha they started that left the halls of the school disheveled.

SStashak:
I hold my children accountable for their brouhahas, disheveled appearances, and apathetic attitudes, however, their mawkish responses to my philippics cause great exasperation.

Geek Brief 012708 -Comic Strip Creator

Make Beliefs - Comic Strip Creation

Think about the opportunity to have your students create a 3 pane comic strip as an alternative to conventional writing. MAKE BELIEF is your tool.

Make Beliefs is a free comic strip creation tool that provides students with a variety of templates, characters, and prompts for building their own comic strips. Make Beliefs provides students with a pre-drawn characters and dialogue boxes which they can insert into each box of their comic strip. The editing options allow users all kind of flexibility. You can change the size of each character and dialogue bubble, bring elements forward within each box, and alter the sequence of each box in the comic strip. AND, here is the best part: Make Beliefs allows users to write their comic strip dialogue in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portugese, or Latin.

Think of the options for any content area. A really fun way for students to be creative The program is internet based and allows for an easy print option- Allowing for a one class period activity. It is very cool-- Check it out!

(Thanks Freetech4teachers!)

GEEK BRIEF 012109 - WORDLE

Wordle is a free 'word art' tool that takes a group of words and creates a visual representation. Originally designed as a fun maker of word clouds, Wordle is being used in interesting ways to provide compelling summaries of anything word related.
As the site says, " Wordle is a toy 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. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends."
I have used it to create a cloud of our WORDS OF THE DAY for the semester


Following are a few ideas to consider(thanks to Rod Lucifer of the blog "Clever Sheep"):

1] Convert a sonnet or Shakespearean play;
2] Key people in historical events
3] Combine student 'Who Are You?' introductions, to develop a class composite;
4] Condense survey data by dumping content of questionnaire responses into the Wordle engine;
5] A new take on "reflecting" or journaling.
6] Turn an essay into a poster;
7] Automate the creation of word poetry;
8] As an introduction to a unit or course, combine key words; themes; curriculum expectations to provide learners with a visual overview of content;
9] Convert nutritional content of one's weekly diet or of a group's menu preferences
10] Paste the results of a Google search (Can you guess the keywords I used?);
11] Enter keywords from weekly weather reports to obtain a seasonal picture;
12] Distill song lyrics
13] Find out what you've been up to by summarizing To-Do lists;
14] Represent the results of a brainstorming session or the minutes of a meeting visually;
15] Show "This date in History" stories in a new way;

Try it- it really is fun!

GEEK BRIEF 011209 - WIKIS

Today's brief is a WIKI- Information about WIKIS is a conversation for another day(I will have several posts on "wikis" at a later date) Essentially, wikis are based on the same concept as "Wikipedia"-- an online space where people can collaborate/share information. A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content. Basically, anyone and everyone can share and CREATE the information on the page- The implication for education is how correct/factual/ reliable is the information? That said, wikis that are created with activities are often good resources as there is no research or statistical reliability involved. So-here is today's BRIEF

Teampedia - A Wiki of Team Building Activities

Teampedia is a wiki of team building activities. On Teampedia you can find games and activities for groups of all sizes and ages. They call themselves "a collaborative encyclopedia of free team building activities, free icebreakers, teamwork resources, and tools for teams that anyone can edit! The site is designed for a wide audience including: team leaders, trainers, teachers, managers, camp directors, counselors, and youth groups. Teampedia is a wiki so, as you would expect, you can add your own suggestions to Teampeida.

Ideas for the classroom
Teampedia could be a good source of ice-breaker and "getting to know you" activities,as well as team building, collaboration, diversity and team strategy activities.

As we begin a new semester, take a look and see if there is anything that you might use on those first days of getting to know your class. As with blogging, don't be afraid to share or add any of your own ideas/activities on the wiki-- It is a simple process.

GEEK BRIEF 010609

Good morning-- Here is this week's GEEK BRIEF.

GOOGLE NEVER STOPS RE-INVENTING ITSELF.

Google has made it a little easier to refine image searches. Until now, if you entered a search term in Google Images you would get all kinds of images:photographs, drawings, paintings, and clip art. Now you can refine those results by selecting "faces," "clip art," "line drawings," "photo content," or "news content" from a drop down menu or select the type menu.




I know that personally, this will be a help to me as there are times when I want a certain type of image, and would prefer not to have to look through everything else.

Applications for Education
Google calls the new image search options "search-by-style", I call it just plain helpful. Any tool that can help students focus their searches is useful in my book. Less time struggling to find appropriate search results can translate into more time spent thinking, writing, and creating.

Check it out!!

Everything is fine in 2009!

Greetings-- It's back to school and a brand new year. Wipe the slate clean, start anew, make those resolutions, plans and try to keep them!

Florida was great- 3 rounds of golf, too much food and laughter and plenty of great friendships!

But, now, it's back to work. Given the great response to the 12 days of TECHristmas, I plan to continue with a weekly GEEK BRIEF. I will post the "briefs" on this blog as well as the group email route. Hopefully we can all keep a resolution to continue learning and growing. Posts will appear on Tuesday or Wednesdays