Another Free and Useful Vocabulary Tool

This free tool is pretty cool: the Visual Thesaurus' VocabGrabber. When users copy and paste a passage that they'd like to use for vocabulary development, the tool selects, categorizes, and defines vocabulary words from the selection. In addition, the tool displays the targeted word in the parent site's graphic thesaurus (Visual Thesaurus) and provides examples from the entered text. Very nice.

One cautionary note: multi-meaning words, idioms, and professional jargon may be defined too narrowly, as in my illustrated example (above). Of course, funny mistakes can be teaching tools also.

Picnik Photo Editing Tool

Another free and excellent online image editing tool is Picnik. Besides standard editing tools (exposure, rotation, cropping, red eye fix), Picnik has some really neat effects. I played with a nice-to-begin-with picture that I took last week-end at Callaway Gardens and added multiple effects. I like it.

Uploading my photo, editing, and saving it to my computer required no registration. I did have the convenient option of saving the finished product to Picnic, but would have needed to register for that. Picnic also allows users to grab Web pictures easily from photo sharing sites, as well as from any Web url (Be sure that you have permission!), but does not share your images with anyone.

Callaway Gardens and Picasa3 Editing Tool

What a beautiful Saturday at the Sibley Center and Mr. Cason's Vegetable Garden.

I discovered that Picasa 3 provides a flexible collage creator, which is easily uploaded to Blogger. I used it to create the a quick, easy, and good-looking collage. I especially liked the options for layout and grid color. Wish that Picasa had an option for including captions or alternate text.

Blueberry Redux

Earlier this summer a friend and I worked hard for two hours to pick a gallon of blueberries each. The bushes from which we picked were all but barren.

Today Anna and I tried a new-to-us, pick-your-own grove and found what must be the blueberry mother lode in this part of the world. She and I picked for two hours from neighboring bushes, each gathering two gallons.

The morning was overcast and cool, perfect for blueberry picking. Neighborhood birds agreed, and several accompanied us: lots of noisy crows, a brown thrasher or two, and
one beautiful red-headed woodpecker. A particularly critical mockingbird seemed very worried that we might pick all of his breakfast berries. He definitely needed to relax!
We left plenty for him and all of his friends, and took a half a gallon berries to my parents. Tonight Anna and I made blueberry jam and blueberry sweet rolls. Now what to do with the other 3 gallons...

Tech note: I forgot to take my camera again, and had to use my Blackberry to take pictures of the blueberries and Anna. The images don't look great here, but when double-clicked and brought to their full sizes, they look pretty old good considering what I used to capture them.

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Walking the Riverwalk

Today, while waiting for my bike inner tube to be replaced, instead of pedaling down the Chattahoochee Riverwalk as planned, we took a very short walk. Too muggy to walk very far, but we enjoyed Seward Johnson's bronze, When Now Becomes Then, as well as the herons, cormorants, gar, and turtles, who were also out enjoying a steamy, overcast Georgia July afternoon. We'll be back with inflated tires and a pair of binoculars for a longer trip soon.

View a (too small) video below or follow the link to a larger slideshow. I imported the digital images from the SD (Secure Digital) memory card to Picasa 3, uploaded them directly to my public, online Picasa album, and linked that here. Picasa 3 also allowed me to create and embed a photo video with the images. I like the slideshow better, I think.

Kayak Time

Last summer Anna and I kayaked in Choctawatchee Bay while we were at SanDestin. FUN! This afternoon we paddled about 2.2 miles at Lake Brandt in Greensboro, NC. MORE FUN. On this trip we spotted three or four great blue herons -- wading, flying, perching, fishing, and SQUAWKING at us!

My friend, Gail, has been working on me to buy a kayak. But where will I store it? How will we transport it? Where will we use it? Will we drown? What if we roll? How will we carry it? Gail sighs, looks me firmly in the eye, and says that we will buy them and kayak. Period. Yes, M'am!

(Pictures were uploaded from my Blackberry...poor quality, but convenient for uploading on the fly directly to Blogger.)

Bays, Beaches, Bikes, Botany, Birds, and Best Buds

Here's a short Flash slideshow of our trip to Destin, Florida: a delightful week of perfect beach weather, turquoise gulf, lots of seafood and fun, shared by family and a sweet friend. Blessed. Truly.

Wordle Fun

Image created using Wordle at http://www.wordle.net/

Read about Wordle on Tech & Learning online magazine and thought it was pretty cute. I used the 25 vocabulary words and 5 book titles that I targeted during my Action Research Project last Fall. I think that my students might enjoy creating a Wordle with their vocabulary or articulation words. However, since Wordle does not filter for inappropriate words, I'm betting that the school district blocks the site. While I do understand that, it's also frustrating. Oh well, add that to the list.

Oxbow Redux

When Laurie and I visited Oxbow Meadows earlier this week, I found out about the 8 AM Saturday bird walks and planned to go. Maybe because of a stormy Friday evening...or possibly because 8:00 comes so darned early on Saturdays...Fife and I were the only visitors. We thoroughly enjoyed the leisurely walk down to the ponds with our gracious guide, Patricia. It was a beautiful day and she identified the birds I had actually seen on Wednesday -- cormorants (not turkey vultures), little blue herons (not great white egrets!!!), indigo buntings and blue grosbeaks (not painted buntings), as well as a few new ones (green heron, blue bird, wood duck, tree swallow, pine siskin, towhee, mockingbird, eastern phoebe)! We also saw the goldfinches that we had seen earlier in the week, but today they were brilliantly yellow. All were totally awesome to me.

As we were leaving the trail, Patricia spotted the adult Little Blue Herons wading in the water hyacinths. What I had mistakenly identified through the binoculars on Wednesday afternoon as great white egrets, were most likely immature Little Blues (white also).

Technology application of the day: definitely Picasa 3! It can be set to detect picture files. Although I did not use that feature, I easily imported pictures to one file, edited one or two, and could have imported them directly into this blog (Picasa and Blogger are Google aps). Instead I added a few captions, changed the font and background color, selected a transition style, imported a soundtrack, and let Picasa create a movie, which I easily embedded in the blog. I believe that even the youngest elementary-aged student could create a movie this way, with appropriate scaffolding. I can't wait to show this new feature of Picasa 3 to our teachers.


My non-SLR camera did not "capture the moment" well, but I at least had the color settings right today.

Snowy Georgia March

We awoke this morning to steadily falling snow - about an inch accumulation - and thunder: a phenomenon appropriately termed thundersnow. Yesterday morning's Weather.com winter storm prognostications convinced us to change our plans to spend the entire week-end with our daughter in North Carolina. We drove home a day early, not wanting to drive in snow/sleet. Though the decision translated our already brief visit into a less than 22 hour one, we were able to attend her spellbinding MFA thesis reading of Us and the Wondrous Secret. We also met the program members of her writing community, so the visit was delightful in every way. Also, on the upside, the shorter North Carolina visit afforded us a surprise Atlanta dinner with our son on the way home. I'm glad to be off the road, but am missing those babies.

I used the strange weather as an excuse to experiment with video on Blogger. Please pardon the poor resolution/unedited video. My good video camera is broken, and I used an OLD digital still camera in its place. I'm also having Windows Movie Maker woes with this computer (suspect that this has more to do with the amount of video I have stored on the four year old pc, rather than anything else).

I inserted this example just to see how Blogger handles video. I am also experimenting with converting files from mov to wmv format. Downloaded a free tool, Any Video Converter, from Download.com. Seems to have worked just fine. Note...I later deleted that video and uploaded another in mov format. Seems that Blogger likes that format just as well. However, because I expect to insert this video in PowerPoint for a language lesson tomorrow, I needed the wmv version.

Knowledge Management

What a great idea to use a wiki for knowledge management, if not original with me. But I like the idea of a blog with tags for the same purpose. Aaargh - too many choices. For now, I've decided to take all of my IT resources, course work, and contacts and put them on a wiki. OK, and tag my blog :).

PERFECT bubbl.us Experiment: Vocabulary Graphic Organizer

Link to PERFECT on bubbl.us

Email snafus

Oakleaf Hydrangea Blossom at Night - Completely unrelated to the subject of this posting. I just enjoy the photograph.

My techno friends know that I can put my foot in my virtual mouth faster than anyone in cyberspace. My email fiascoes are both numerous and embarrassing; I refuse to recount them here. Usually, my curiosity, combined with uber-impulsivity, is what sets me up for humiliation. Such was the case this morning. I was playing around with Twitter, a new quirky tool for me, and saw that I could use my gmail address book to automatically search for friends to follow. Instead of selecting to search, I had actually requested to follow everyone in my gmail address book (luckily, not as many as in my primary email account!)...business and school associates, in addition to family and friends. I was horrified to discover what I had done, but too embarrassed to send a follow-up email explaining my mistake. So, now random people are probably scratching their heads and wondering why-the-heck I am asking to twitter (follow) them around the Internet. But as my father once advised me, after one foot is in your mouth, don't put the other one in with it. I don't even want to know who got the email. Geeeeeee!

Building Schema with Vocabulary and Vocabulary with Schema

| View | Upload your own

This PowerPoint is a very quickly thrown together example of an introductory language lesson that I use with my deaf/hard-of-hearing students. I like to use digital video animations of interesting children's storybooks for small group language lessons. These digital stories offer numerous opportunities to develop rich schema, vocabulary, word play, imagery, sequencing, syntax, narrative discourse, and comprehension strategies. I used this particular slide show to introduce the target vocabulary and concepts -- animal families, members of categories, and animal homes -- that would appear in the video.

The PowerPoint was very easy to put together and provided a nice, but static, foundation for the charming story, Over in the Meadow (Langstaff). That video can be found on the Scholastic DVD The Wheels on the Bus. My students enjoyed the very short video (less than ten minutes long)several times, and, as such, had multiple exposures to the new words and concepts.

To make the lessons more child-directed, dynamic, and powerful, I plan to video tape a sign language interpretation of the text and will then use Windows MovieMaker to create an ASL accessible video for my students. In addition, I will use either PowerPoint, Adobe Acrobat, or a Web site to create interactive game-like activities for them to practice associating word meaning with the new words. They have done this same activity with Good Night, Gorilla (Rathman). Besides being delighted to have the ASL interpretation which they could control, they paid rapt attention to the lessons and left the speech therapy sessions spontaneously using the new words. So, they went beyond acquiring meaning (receptive) to meaningfully using (expressive) the words in connected language.



While the PowerPoint does provide attractive graphics, text, animations, and sound effects, if used without the situated context of the storybook, I believe that my students' experience would have been rather flat and the effects transient.

Facilitating Technology Integration in a Resistant Environment

...thoughts in progress...

SLP Wiki Integration

A year ago I looked at adoption of innovations in the workplace for my RCA Theory project. I examined the Facilitative Conditions (as cited in Surry & Ely, 2007) that we had studied in ITED 8100 (Dr. Zahner) to look for patterns of workplace failures and successes, as cited by my peers and me.

Facilitative Conditions

(1) Dissatisfaction with Status Quo
(2) Knowledge and Skills Exist
(3) Availability of Resources
(4) Availability of Time
(5) Rewards and/ or Incentives
(6) Participation
(7) Commitment
(8) Leadership


I am revisiting my own comments to determine their accuracy, as I interpret the situation with the Wiki I created five months ago for our department. This is what I wrote in February, 2007.

Each of the three unsuccessful or partially successful projects lacked leadership, commitment, and participation of all stakeholders. If the organizational leadership is not committed to the innovation's successful implementation and does not value participation of all stakeholders, the other factors will most likely not be present to the necessary degree. If the remaining five factors are present without leadership, commitment, and participation, success may be present but limited, and institutionalization may not occur. Facilitating conditions should be present beginning with the design phase. Development, utilization, management, and evaluation will all be negatively affected by their omission in the earliest stage of the project.

I'm going to take the next few days to think about this. More later. Woops. I just read my original analysis again.

Facilitative Conditions - relative to the SLP Wiki

(1) Dissatisfaction with Status Quo -- YES
(2) Knowledge and Skills Exist -- 1/2 and 1/2
(3) Availability of Resources -- YES
(4) Availability of Time -- They don't believe this, but could be convinced somewhat easily
(5) Rewards and/ or Incentives - A good start with crucial forms provided on site; could do more
(6) Participation -- Somewhat
(7) Commitment -- meaning??? look it up
(8) Leadership -- NOPE

Shoulda. Coulda. Woulda. Blatantly obvious what is missing. Not so sure what to do about it. But I'm perking on it. Research Idea! hmmmmmmmmmm.


Surry, D. W., & Ely, D.P. (2007). Adoption, diffusion, implementation, and institutionalization of
instructional innovations. In R. A. Reiser & J. V. Dempsey (Eds.), Trends and issues in instructional
design and technology (pp.104-111). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.