GOOGLE EARTH and WORDLE

http://childlightusa.wordpress.com/2010/08/22/the-21st-century-mason-school-by-jennifer-spencer/

Google Earth–If you have not seen Google Earth, you are missing something spectacular. It is a program that has to be downloaded to your computer. Once you have installed it, you can type in an address or attraction and see satellite images. A friend told me yesterday that she was reading to her child about dikes in Amsterdam. After the passage was read and narrated, she asked her daughter to describe what she thought a dike looked like. Then they went to Google Earth and were able to see one up close. You can find Google Earth at www.earth.google.com.


Wordle–This one is fun, though there may be fewer uses for it in a Mason school than some of the other sites. Wordle is a place where you can copy and paste large amounts of text and create a “Word Cloud”. Here is an example of a word cloud I made out of the first four chapters of Mason’s A Philosophy of Education. The more times a word appears in the text, the larger its image in the word cloud. This is useful for pulling out the main themes in difficult documents like the Declaration of Independence, or for helping older children with composition by allowing them to see whether or not the most prominent ideas are the ones they intended. Make your own word cloud at www.wordle.net.