Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Explore the potential

Scratch, JotForm and Many Eyes all look quite promising for educators to explore.

Scratch (imagine, program share) is a free download (Windows or Mac) of a new programming language designed to appeal to young people, to enhance their creativity, design and technological fluency.
It has been developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab.

The program makes it 'easy for young people to create interactive stories, animations, games, music and art.' The website provides tutorials on creating, learning and programming with Scratch and the opportunity to share projects.

JotForm is an intuitive, easy to use, web-based WYSIWYG form builder. Outputs can be collected in a spreadsheet. Limits on the free version include 100 e-mails per day & file uploads limited to 10 MBs per account.

Many Eyes! is an amazing data visualization tool. Check the website for a wide range of examples and interact with the data. Many Eyes! claims to be able to 'harness the collective intelligence of the net for insight and analysis.'

2 comments:

  1. All of these are really great. I am particularly impressed with Scratch. I see this as the way that we will get programming back into schools and having every student engaging with this wonderful HOTS activity. Very very nice find and thankyou for alerting me to it.

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  2. Hi Peter,
    I agree. Keep us informed on any feedback from students and teachers and post a link to any examples you would like to share.
    Vonnie

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