Wordles From Chapter VI in the Scarlet Letter

See if we can pick out differences in Pearl's construction throughout Chapter VI.

First Half

Second Half

Animations or Images

   Frankly, I don't see the difference in most learning applications between using an animation over an image. An image can be so rich, so multifaceted, so ambiguous, that through proper manipulation of the form of an image, or by using more than one image, great learning can occur.
    Consider one of my topic earlier, Google Body or Google Earth.  These are basically just images, but they are three dimensional and able to be manipulated by the viewer.  I think viewer interactivity is a better educational litmus test than if the picture actually moves.  
   Lots of educational writers use the term "static" image, but isn't a flash video that replays over and over again just as starchy and annoying.  I think effective visual representations should be able to be played with, adjusted, allowing the reader a way to connect and personalize what he's seeing.  We should be judging our visualizations by the user experience, not just what it "looks like."

A good grammar video...does such a thing exist?

   So I went on the hunt for some good grammar videos.  I'm sure that's a sentence most people write on a daily basis.  What I found were lots of grammar videos but nothing good.  Lots of people in front of the whiteboard, lots of boring stuff.  Grammar is boring to begin with; couple that with the low quality of most web videos . . . I couldn't finish the stuff.  How would my students?

Grammar Girl

    Grammar Girl  is one of my favorite web sites for grammar.  It's run by a woman named Mignon Fogarty.  She does a great job of responding to real grammar issues and coming up with responses to people's questions.  She has a lot of articles, but she does some great podcasts as well.
     Here's a great podcast on a common grammar issue, affect vs. effect.    Ms. Fogarty does a nice job using a really simple illustration and pneumonic to get her point across.  She includes a voicemail in the beginning of the podcast to identify the problem.  The whole podcast is a manageable 5 minutes.
     There's a defined goal here, a simple and clear message, all in a mangeable format.

Visualizations--Good and Bad

   Images seem to be one of the ubiquitous aspects of the internet.  A major website like SI.com will have hundreds of individual links.  Take a minute and really look at the image below:

   You've got box scores, you've got stories, blogs, front page articles, you have subscriptions, links to every major sport and other topics.  You can go from this page to almost any piece of information in the sports world.  One click.  That's no accident.  

    We are now used to this kind of visual delivery for content.  In the last few years, the internet has spawned the infographic.  A long, visual representation of ideas with text.  You have to scroll through these graphics just as you would a news articles, and they contain text.  What's key here though is how carefully they use color and simple images to get their ideas across.  Here's an interesting example:

Source: Frugal dad

     Some sites are not elegantly organized or barely use any images.  Our school formerly used groupfusion as a webportal.  We had pages that looked like the following:

Groupfusion... Bleh...

     Groupfusion was functional for our school.  You could have announcements and files, links and calendar updates.  But this wasn't much more than a glorified filing cabinet for resources.  There was no real way of prioritizing information by date or importance.  It was hard to group links and files together in a single folder.  But there wasn't the kind of graphical interface that makes other webportals effective.  The kids knew that when they were on Groupfusion, you were doing SCHOOL stuff.  And not in a good way.