This evening I received a few tweets from friends who are attending ACTFL about some interesting new tools.
TAGUL: @lrosen sent on this one. Tagul was made by the same gent who made Wordle but this time the words become hyperlinks. Tagul will be free in beta, but the creator is pretty sure he’ll be charging later on. Here is a Tagul cloud made out of words from this blog. If you roll over them they jump up, if you click on them they should (fingers crssed if I read the FAQs correctly, take you back into LLU to find the post with that word.
It’s lovely, but it’s buggy. And when you make changes in the code via the web interface it takes FOREVER for it to stick. [note from ryan: and if you’re reading this via RSS all you get is a big honkin’ N/A. click through to the llu site if you want to see the tagul cloud.] I think I will stick with wordle until tagul becomes less clunky and frustrating.
2) @mundaysa tweeted this: VOCES project created the LARC in San Diego, in particular their interviews with Guatemalan, Dominican, Spanish and Mexican Women. Check out the LARC’s other resources, they are pretty phenomenal… oh how I wish I had known about this page on Human Rights in Latin America or this one on the Dirty War when I was slogging through the Spanish textbook’s (reallly weak) attempt at presenting these subjects…
3) And then of course there are the Skritter Dudes. If you do not know Skritter then you must drop everything and read about it now. This is a wonderful tool for students of Chinese (and now Japanese)…made by former Oberlin College students who were studying Chinese and who wanted to find an efficient way to learn their characters and have that learning stick.
I’m not gonna say anything more (except that I love Nick’s shoes in this twitpic), but I encourage you to check out their site and try out their tool.
You can follow ACTFL via Twitter at @ACTFL
