Create Word Clouds on Your iPad With ABCya's Word Clouds App

ABCya’s Word Clouds iPad app makes it easy to quickly create word clouds on your iPad. To create a word cloud with Word Clouds by ABCya just type or paste text into the text field. After entering your text Word Clouds by ABCya will generate a visual representation of the most common words in your passage of text. You can customize the generated word cloud by choosing different fonts, different color schemes, and by excluding words from the word cloud. Your word clouds can be saved directly to your iPad’s camera roll.

Applications for Education
Using word clouds can be a good way to help students analyze documents. By copying the text of a document into a word cloud generator your students can quickly see the words that appear most frequently in that document.

Word clouds can also be used to help students see which words that they have frequently used in their own works. Have your students create word clouds of their work during the revision process of writing a story or essay. The word cloud will quickly show students which words they have used a lot. Then ask them to think about synonyms for the words that they have used most often in their writings.

Disclosure: ABCya! gives me money for groceries and dog food every month. Actually, they give me money for advertising. 

Earth Science and Socioeconomic Data Maps

The Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center publishes data sets and maps designed to blend the studies of socioeconomics and Earth science. One of the results of that work is the creation of some interesting mapped visualizations of data sets. Some of the more interesting maps illustrate correlations between climate zone and population density. All of the maps can be downloaded and printed for free use in your classroom. The data sets behind the maps are also freely available for classroom use.

Applications for Education
Maps can be a social studies teacher's best friend. But they can also be useful for science teachers and math teachers who wish to have their students take information from data sets and transform it into something new. These maps could provide a model for a project in which your students collect local data and display it on a map.

Five Fun and Free iPad Apps That Help Students Learn to Write

Jumbled Sentences is a series of five free iPad apps designed to help students learn to construct sentences. The apps provide students with drag and drop activities in which they sort jumbled words into sentences. The sound can be turned off and on in each app. When the sound is turned on students can hear the words read them by the narrator. The narrator also reads the sentences that students construct. The app provides students with immediate feedback on each of the sentences that they build. When students correctly create sentences they earn virtual coins that they can then use to buy virtual stickers to mark their progress.

Click here for Jumbled Sentences 1

Click here for Jumbled Sentences 2

Click here for Jumbled Sentences 3

Click here for Jumbled Sentences 4

Click here for Jumbled Sentences 5

If This Then That - Automate Routine Tasks

If This Then That is a helpful website for automating many routine online tasks. If This Then That helps you automate tasks like saving your Pinterest pins to your Evernote account, setting text alerts for calendar events, and sending email attachments directly to your Dropbox account. There are thousands of formulas, "recipes" is what IFTTT calls them, available in the gallery of recipes. The recipes are all contributed by the community of IFTTT members and you can contribute too. You can browse channels of recipes that are based on the use of popular services like Gmail, Dropbox, Evernote, Instagram, and Google Drive. Click here to see the hundreds of recipes that incorporate Google Drive functions.

Applications for Education
I don't know of any teachers who couldn't use a little more time in their days. If This Then That won't give you more time in the day, but the recipes could help you automate some tasks and free up time for other things in your day.

The Week in Review - The ISTE Edition

Adam Bellow programming
a robot at ISTE 2014.

Good afternoon from the ISTE conference in Atlanta, Georgia. I've had a great couple of days connecting with educators from all over the world. The best aspect of conferences like this is getting to learn from other educators. Yesterday, I shared a cool idea that I picked up from Jen Roberts at the conference. Next week I'll share some other ideas that I picked up here at ISTE 2014. If you would like to see what others at ISTE 2014 are sharing, check out #ISTE2014 on Twitter and or Google+.

Here are this week's most popular posts:
1. How to Send Emails from a Google Spreadsheet
2. Find Primary Sources from All Over the World on the World Digital Library
3. Why Book Trailers Are Great Alternatives to Traditional Book Reports
4. Students Can Create Nice Explanatory Videos on Shadow Puppet Edu
5. 19 Educational Games About U.S. Civics
6. Google Announces a New Version of Google Drive
7. A Few Widgets To Consider Adding To Your Classroom Blog

Three seats are left at the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camp. Seats are still available for my online course Getting Ready for GAFE (start dates in July and August). 

Please visit the official advertisers that help keep this blog going.
Practical Ed Tech is the brand through which I offer PD webinars.
IXL offers a huge assortment of mathematics lesson activities.
Typing Club offers free typing lessons for students.
Discovery Education & Wilkes University offer online courses for earning Master's degrees in Instructional Media.
MasteryConnect provides a network for teachers to share and discover Common Core assessments.
ABCya.com is a provider of free educational games for K-5.
The University of Maryland Baltimore County offers graduate programs for teachers.
Boise State University offers a 100% online program in educational technology.
EdTechTeacher is offers professional development workshops in Boston and Chicago.
StoryBoard That is a great tool for creating comics and more.

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