Welcome to the conversation!

Join historical novel writer Marilyn Weymouth Seguin here every week for conversation about digital tools you can use for researching, writing, revising, publishing and promoting your work! Buy the eBook at this link.

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Make your own word cloud poster

Want to make a promotional poster or logo for your book?  Try the free tool at http://www.wordle.net/
Type in a list of words or cut and paste a piece of text from your book into the tool and click “go.”  According to the website, “You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.”
Here is a word cloud I created using this toy:

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Procrastination


This winter I am trying to finish a book about Marie Peary, the daughter of the Arctic explorer. Fact is, I’m not making very much progress. Too many distractions. First, there is the holiday rush to contend with—present wrapping, cookie baking, and so on. The biggest distraction of all, though, is the technology I am using to finish researching and writing the damn book. Yesterday went like this:

I woke up and decided to devote the entire morning to writing chapter 4 (I told you I hadn’t got very far). I sat down at the computer, opened up a new file, and titled it Chapter 4. Hmmmm. How to begin? I reread the draft of Chapter 3 and fiddled with a few sentences there. This all took about 20 minutes and I still couldn’t think of how to begin Chapter 4.

So, I decided to check in on my email. Three messages---all from students wondering about their final grades. It only took five minutes to read the messages, but one student gave a link to website she wanted me to review as a follow up for her final project. That took another 10 minutes. Oh yes, and while I was on the internet, I decided to check my Face book posts. Oops, someone posted something controversial on my wall—I then needed to post and upload a video and link in order to make a rebuttal. First, I had to find the link. Another fifteen minutes.

I decided to knock off for lunch at 11 a.m. and after that I had to watch the news and after that, I was a little sleepy so I took a walk to wake myself up. The walk made me tired, so I decided to take a little nap, and when I woke up, I didn’t feel like writing anymore. Therefore, I decided to devote today to working on Chapter 4, and here I am writing this blog post. Now that it’s done, I think I’ll have lunch because it is 11 a.m. After that, I’ll work on Chapter 4.

Monday, December 5, 2011

Technology tools you can use


One of my favorite email subscriptions is called “Free Technology for Teachers.” This daily message outlines three or four web tools that teachers K-12 can use for teaching and learning.  Although I teach college, I can usually find an application for higher ed in using these tools. I write about some of them in this blog, giving applications for using the tools for researching and writing historical fiction.

Last week, one of the tools in the mailing was a video showing how to sit at the computer if you are doing serious work—not just browsing the internet.  Here is the link directly from the Free Technology for Teachers, so you can check out both the video and the blog.