Monday, December 16, 2013

airtightinteractive.com, what a great idea!

airtightinteractive.com displays search results visually as in the shot below:
If you are a teacher, you'll immediately appreciate the relevance of this tool for brainstorming ideas, which is by far the most difficult stage in any writing lesson. Teaching students how to generate ideas is a perennial source of agony for teachers: how to make sure students' knowledge and experience match the requirements of a given piece of writing? Age and cultural background do not lend much help here; similarly, exposure to mass media seems to leave students blank and untouched. All of this usually boils down to a casual "we don't have ideas." What happens next is episode after episode of betraying the course objectives, where the teacher sinks into a teach-answer-teach loop: instruction-no reaction/call for help-modelling of answer-instruction etc. It's a tale of helplessness disguised as a-matter-of-fact teaching routine which seems to satisfy students, poor vessels to be filled to the brim with facts, to quote Dickens in Hard Times
Let's keep literature at bay or we will be dragged into the existential Why I am teaching writing at all?

airtightinteractive.com presents an interesting tool that might alleviate this existential angst.This is called a related_tag_browser, a sophisticated geeky  term that means an application that collects search data and presents it visually. Interestingly enough, the results appear as if organised in a typical graphic organizer which teachers commonly use to brainstorm ideas. What's more, in the centre of the diagram you can find pictures of the key words pasted at the perimeter. There is only one problem, which I guess you have already found: where can the student step in?  
   

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