I just recieved my spiffy little Edublogger membership badge from Patricia Donaghy who manages things at the International Edubloggers Directory. I’m proud to be a member, albiet a small fish in a big sea.

Anyhow, in checking out Patricia’s blog, I noticed this interesting post about a facinating online tool called Visuwords. I tell you what, even if you aren’t a word geek this tool will still be interesting to you. Makes more sense if you check it out but the basic premise is this - provide a word, any word….then a beautiful graphic reporesentation of the relationship of that word to other words and phrases dynamically generates within the browser. You can dig into deeper associations by double clicking on subsequent words and word combinations.

At least you’ll learn what a hyponym, hypernym, meronym, and holonym are. Trust me, its much cooler than it sounds.

VISUWORDS

Here’s a couple blog posts I found interesting this week…

Actively Opposing Creativity Fatigue
Six Degrees of Separation in Instant Messaging
Shopping for a Wiki Tool?
Audio Transcript from “The Evolving Federal Role in Education”

I’m beat. Its been a heck of a week. Being out of the district at the end of last week and planning on doing some training in NYC for almost all of next week, I had to cram a BUNCH of stuff in the last couple of days. I needed a break and thought I’d do a quick blog on a couple of things I’ve been meaning to post about.

First, I saw a cool map mash-up project on histroic Route 66. This (and other map mash up projects) would be great to integrate into a social studies/geography class. I found this one very interesting. Even inclues video interviews to create an entire oral history of Route 66. Here’s a useful bookmark list related to mashups where I found this as linked from David Warlick’s blog.

Another recent add to my del.icio.us bookmarks is this nifty little experiment by Carl Anderson, who authors a blog called Techno Constructivist (I love that name…I need a catchy title for my blog…..any suggestions?)

Here’s a free screen capture/recording software that seems to work pretty good. Plain and simple screencasts galore with uTIPu. Check it out.