It is paramount that teachers recognize and remember that most of their students do not learn in the same ways that they themselves learn. Simply trying harder doesn’t work if you learn differently!

I’m especially pleased when I discover new resources that put multiple means of representation together in one place!  Here’s one that gathers text, images, and videos into one place.  Of course, you can add an audio version of the text as well, with one of many readily available text-to-speech options.

Navify is a service that combines Wikipedia articles with related videos from Youtube and online images.  So, when a topic is entered into the search bar, it brings up the pertinent Wikipedia article along with videos and images on the same subject.  With the multiple means of representation offered, there is a far greater chance of engaging a wider range of learners.

The first screen shot below shows the Wikipedia article that opens when ‘tiger’ is typed into the search box.  You can see the tabs above the article for Images and Videos.  The second screen shot shows what appears when the Images tab is clicked, and the third shows the videos.

It should be noted that it is up to users to select the images and videos that are associated with an article.  For all of the search terms I entered, I was offered an extensive collection of images and videos to choose from.  Since Navify is a relatively new service, there were relatively few videos associated with any of the topics I searched.

Two other features of Navify are also worth mentioning.  The first is that users have the opportunity to comment on topics.  Secondly, related topics are suggested with search results.

Tag Galaxy is an application where folksonomy, Flickr, and creative three-dimensional presentation come together in a way that is highly effective.  The net result is an intuitive visual way to search for images on Flickr and to see the relationships between tags.

You enter a tag into a search box,  and that tag becomes a “sun”  that is orbited by a “galaxy” of related tags. The related tags are presented as planets orbiting the sun. If you wish to combine tags, you simply click on  an orbiting tag and create a new sun with its own galaxy of related tags.

Once you have the desired tag, or combination of tags, you click on the planet you’ve created to view a globe of related images, as shown in the screenshot below for the tags Himalayas and Nepal.  (This globe shows the first 235 of the 17,994 Flickr images tagged Himalayas and Nepal!) The globe can be tilted, rotated, and spun in any direction to find and select an image.

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