EdTechTopia

Many educators across the country and around the world used today’s Presidential Inauguration of Barak Obama as a teachable moment.  But just because the inauguration itself is over, that doesn’t mean the teaching opportunities attached to it have expired as well.

Here are a couple of quick ideas for how to use free, online tools to talk with your students about the Inauguration of January 20th, 2009 as well as Obama’s impending presidency:

• Create a Word Cloud.
  • Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Obama’s “Inaugural Speech” Word Cloud
http://www.wordle.net/

Barak Obama’s Complete Inaugural Speech

Alexander’s Inaugural Poem Word Cloud

http://www.wordle.net/

Elizabeth Alexander’s Poem for Barak Obama’s Presidential Inauguration

• Create/Add to a Voicethread
  • What’s a VoiceThread Anyway?