Working together to develop

A week or two ago my husband went to a gathering of teachers sharing their ideas about using technologies. He came back with many new ideas some of which I know he is using. I think it is amazing how much both he and I use ideas shown to us by other people. After I posted about Wordle yesterday we chatted about how we used thoughts and ideas from other people to get a solution to a problem. Someone showed him Wordle, he showed someone else, they worked out how to screen save, showed him and he showed me, I worked out how to save the new picture. I can only describe this as a chain of shared ideas- each in isolation did not produce an outcome anywhere close to what we produced together.


Some genius's may work alone but I think that for most of us we need other people to help us learn. I am learning all the time, watching other people, listening and copying other peoples good ideas. This is not some kind of plagerism, its a way of developing as a person, as any idea borrowed must be adapted to fit our lives.


At the teachers gathering, one thing someone spoke about was Geocaching, which was explained to me as being a bit like playing hide and seek with GPS cordinates telling you where to go to find "caches" of hidden goodies. It  sounds like fun and a way of giving a purpose to going for a walk in places which are so familiar we have tended not to want to bother visiting recently. So I googled Geocaching and found Geocaching.com (http://www.geocaching.com/). Its got a massive list of hide and seek hunts to go on, and so we plan to try one this weekend.

 Another Wordle with some of those keywords for learning and exploring new ideas.

Here are two more Wordles from my favourite poems " I expect to pass through this world but once..." and "...Children grow up when your not looking..."

Until next time

Gillian

Wordle- Exporting into Blogs etc.

I've been playing with Wordle today http://www.wordle.net/. A beautiful concept in that you paste or enter text, press go and the program produces fantastic word pictures. They are great fun and look amazing. Adults and children alike seem to love them.

The tricky bit has been how to save them. The program allows you to save them to its Gallery but so many people are using Wordle at the moment that within minutes your saved   Wordle is several pages back and you cannot search for it.

This solution is not too complex and fairly quick

1. Make your Wordle picture
2. Press F8 and print screen at the same time
3. Open Powerpoint and press paste
4. Use crop (under format) to get rid of the screen bits you don't want
5. Click on wordle picture and (right click) to save as picture 
6. Save as format jpeg, png or gif
7. You now have your own Wordle picture which you can import into your blog or elsewhere

If you choose you could of course stick with importing into Powerpoint or alternatively into Word.

Thanks to Sue and John for starting me on how to print the screen and import into Powerpoint. Thanks to Kieran for showing me how to crop in Powerpoint- its funny how the little things can prove a stumbling block until someone helps...

Here's one I've just made with words I like:-

Until next time
Gillian