Thursday, May 29, 2008

Serenade


The seniors have two days to go until they are finished, and you can feel the excitement in the air. We just had a quartet serenade the library with "When the Saints Go Marching In". Trumpets and horns in each corner of the library during E block in a sort of kamikaze concert. It was great!
photo credit: Flickr Creative Commons
Trumpet View by Geoff Carr

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Evaluating

We are halfway through May, pulling book orders together, up to our hips in student research projects, and database vendors are calling to check on renewals. We need to evaluate the year and make some careful decisions.

TagCrowd is a neat new (free) online tool that offers a snapshot evaluation, using tagcloud technology. Highlight a body of text, or submit a URL, and TagCrowd spits out a cloud that visually ranks word repetition. Del.icio.us, the social networking bookmark site uses this, as does LibraryThing.

Using it with my blog over the past year you can get an idea about what we have been doing. The word "comments" jumps out at me, which isn't surprising as so much of this year has been dedicated to getting feedback from students and teachers. The 5 Year Plan Survey generated a lot of information, and we will be working with the data over the next month to draft the final report.

Think about what it would be like for a student to use this to evaluate some writing, or to check a site for bias? I'm not sure how I'll be promoting this, but it is great tool to have on hand.