Tag cloud with TAGUL

TAGUL is a web service that enables you to create gorgeous tag clouds. Similar to WORDLE. Point with your mouse over the words and see how they come alive! If you click on the tag, Google finds related pages.
You need to register and then you can start playing with words.

Listen and relax!

Here is my little gift to you - a lovely song that will go perfectly well together with thoughts about why people celebrate Valentine's Day (those who do). Because they feel unloved or, on the contrary, they are bursting with love? Because they are open to any fun that passes by or they are in need of brushing up their lives? What if there is nothing behind?

Just enjoy being alive!

Happy Valentine's Day!

 

Ladies and gentlemen, Leonard Cohen! 

DANCE ME TO THE END OF LOVE

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love

Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone
Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon
Show me slowly what I only know the limits of
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the wedding now, dance me on and on
Dance me very tenderly and dance me very long
We're both of us beneath our love, we're both of us above
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the children who are asking to be born
Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn
Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic till I'm gathered safely in
Touch me with your naked hand or touch me with your glove
Dance me to the end of love

A video for teaching Conditionals

Use this great video at the lesson when you are teaching conditionals. You may also watch it on YouTube or download it to your PC.

The Poetry Channel

I just discovered a new website The Poetry Channel which presents poetry in videos.
The poems are read by the authors themselves. The site is not big yet because they have just started but I liked it at once because it is exciting and inspiring to watch the poets and listen to their voices.
There are poems which are fantastic for classroom use.

I loved this poem http://thepoetrychannel.org.uk/poems/back-in-the-playground-blues/

Moderating my first online course

[P o s t p o n e d !]
Next month I am starting a new course, approved by the British Council and the Ministry for teachers who want to learn new ways of using the internet with kids at school. This is a great course, challenging, demanding but also satisfying the needs of a caring, professional teacher who wants to be knowledgeable in Web 2.0 tools.

I am looking forward to this course not only because I will have to test my skills as a moderator but also as a blogger who has been blogging in solitude for about a year, writing for myself, as I like to remark. I would love to have comrades who would care to visit my blog and I would be immensely interested in visiting their blogs in return.

I don't feel like twittering or chatting but somehow blogging has an inexplicable appeal to me. A blog is like an open door to a person's thoughts and views. I would like to have a chance to be a guest to another world-of-mind now and then...

Happy New Year

It is the 31st December, 2009. I am living through the last hours of this year, and then... everything starts again?... or just goes on ... because nothing has stopped?
I love what Frost once said:

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.
/Robert Frost/

Make a snowflake!

This is the right time to learn how to cut your own virtual snowflake.
You just need to go to the site which presents a tool for doing it.
Here are some examples of what you can make. 
Make a flake

A new tool KUBBU

I just found an amazing and extremely practical tool for making online activities, exercises, quizzes, puzzles etc called KUBBU - a strange name (meaning nothing) but don't be put off by it.
It is free, you only have to register. I tried it out and was delighted. Something new at last!

Follow this link to see what you can create with this tool - 
http://www.kubbu.com/a1/2498_jobs_and_professions

Web application WALLOVERS

I just discovered a new web application - online pattern painting Wallovers which are symmetrical designs painted on a virtual wall - and got carried away like a kid. It is a tool for drawing patterns in the frame.

One drawback is its very limited choice of colours. I played with the tool tonight and see what I got.

You will need Shockwave player.