Thursday, September 24, 2009

nu jurnL nu toys

Or, in English, new journal new toys.

I picked up the September issue of School Library Journal late this morning while taking a break from web work before lunch. My plan was to take a few minutes to begin perusing the book reviews and place a few juvenile books in a cart for purchase. I didn't get very far; an impromptu visit from the boss took time, but did see their site of the month. Or, in this case, sites of the month. Two of them caught my attention.

transL8it!
"transl8it! (trans-late-it) is simple to use. Just type in your SMS, text, emoticon, smiley, slang or chat room lingo and let transL8it! convert it to plain english -- OR -- type in your phrase in english and convert it to SMS TXT lingo slang!"

Wordle
"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."

I experimented with Wordle before (see A Picture's Worth) using blog posts to create word art. I included it as an emerging technology option for students to investigate for classroom use in a course this summer, some of the resulting posts were very interesting. Earlier this month I read a blog post that lead me to another interesting visual, 100 Days of Twitter Turned Into Pictures. Now I am wondering how a compilation of Twitter posts would appear as a Wordle.

As for transL8tit, I used it to create this post title.

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