The title to tonight's blog is my attempt at a little bit of humor folks! We worked with word prediction though Kurzwiel. It was very interesting and very beneficial for those who type very slow for various reasons. I, who do not type fast, did find it a bit frustrating to work with but am pleased to know that if I ever needed that technology it would be available to me. We also tried a "shareware" version of word predication which I did not find very valuable at all. It did not pick up words that I had just used in a previoud sentence, which I think is unacceptable.
My title was inspired by the attempt to make a wordlist using a piece of literature we had downloaded for free from Project Guttenburg. I choose Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer" which I thought would be a nice easy story to use. I mean, come on, the book is only a 1/4 of an inch thick! But the list of words grew to be over 7000 before I gave up and selected a poem by Robert Frost. It was informative to say the least.
I have to discuss Project Guttenburg which offers tons of books and works that are in the public domain that can be accessed for free. I LOVED IT!!!! I am so excited to go home and check that site out in depth.
We did create our own topic dictionaries which was easier than I thought. I never realized that you could type in almost any topic you would like, plus the word glossary on a search engine and have glossaries pop up for you. This makes a teacher's job very easy when trying to come up with vocabulary words and such for lessons. I typed in the word "Podcasting" and "glossary" and quite a few glossaries came up. NICE!!!!
And last but not least, Rick told us how to go to Cinemagic in Saco, Maine to watch the Red Sox in action on the big screen. While it is not out in the open skies, the action is definately bigger and the food is almost as expensive!!!!
Tracy
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2 comments:
I agree that it amazing how easy it was to make the tpic dictionary and word list. I am sorry that your story was taking forever but now that you have some more free time, due to the summer, you can try to download again.
Thanks for the information about the Red Sox games something to look it into.
Megan
Tracy,
I also loved the Gutenberg library and can't wait to look into it in more detail. From what I did see, it had a number of texts that I currently use and could use with my students. I also loved your idea about using the type of glossary we found to make our dictionaries as a way of creating vocabulary lists. I think that next year I will certainly do this in my Conflict Resolution class and could even see it as beneficial to English class when I want to create my own vocabulary unit as opposed to using one in the book. Thanks for the idea.
Lisa
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