Adam Simon's Blog

Wordle is an amazing tool that I have used in the graphic design part of my life…I didn’t realize that it had great applications for education as well. Wordle creates word clouds based on word usage frequency in a body of text. All you need to do is paste in the text and click “Go” to create [...]

I recently tried Second Life as part of a course I am taking on Educational Technology and, although I felt that the whole thing was very weird, immediately saw the benefits for education. I did, however, feel that the dangers and shortcomings outweighed them and therefore wrote Second Life as an educational tool. Until today… [...]

I don’t really use Wikis in my classroom. In fact, for a while, I couldn’t understand the hype about their application for education; and then it hit me, most of the educators I interact with (online) teach large groups of students spread out into multiple class groups. This type of set-up is an amazing opportunity [...]

Everybody knows that there are hundreds of words for snow in the Eskimo language for snow (which may not be entirely true) and that there are many words to describe the nuanced differences of pasta dishes in Italian (and as the joke goes, hundreds of nuanced words for an idiot in Yiddish), but in Hebrew [...]

Google Docs is a tremendously powerful tool for use in and out of the classroom. The first layer of its awesomeness comes as a function of its creator’s software-philosophy, namely the fact that it – and all the files a user creates and edits – live entirely in the cloud; this makes it accessible from anywhere with [...]