The month of May is synonymous with spring, but in VA public education when someone mentions May, the first thing that pops into a teacher’s mind is Standards of Learning (SOL) testing.For years teachers have advocated the individuality of our students and that not all students learn/test the same way.
Since 1983 when Dr. Howard Gardnerintroduced his theory of Multiple Intelligences, there has been an ongoing controversy as to its validity.Edutopia of the George Lucas Educational Foundationrecently did a Special Report: The Multiple Intelligences Redefine “Smart” .Take a look at the articles, videos, and resources available at this site to see the latest findings and reactions.Hopefully, at some point in time, everyone will finally come to the same conclusion that all students do learn differently, thus they need instruction/testing according to those individual needs.
Some days just don’t seem as much fun as others, and then along comes a really “cool” site on the Internet that just makes you smile all over yourself. This is what happened to me today when I received an e-mail from Paul Barron sharing this great “graphical dictionary”, Visual Words.
Paul describes the site as a visual dictionary that looks up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. It produces diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate.
Enter words into the search box to look them up or double-click a node to expand the tree. Click and drag the background to pan around and use the mouse wheel to zoom. Hover over nodes to see the definition and click and drag individual nodes to move them around to help clarify connections.
* It’s a dictionary! It’s a thesaurus!
* Great for writers, journalists, students, teachers, and artists.
* The online dictionary is available wherever there is an Internet connection.
* No membership required.
Visuwords uses Princeton University a WordNet, an opensource database built by University students and language researchers. Combined with a visualization tool and user interface built from a combination of modern web technologies, Visuwords is available as a free resource to all patrons of the web.
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