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Snip-Its
by Mandy Curtis, copy editor/writer
Pin down history
Those old photographs you’ve been meaning to scrapbook can find new life thanks to Historypin, a partnership between Google and We Are What We Do, a global movement that helps people take action on environmental and social issues.
Historypin, www.historypin.com, allows you and your students to log in, upload photos and “pin” them to the parts of the world in which they were taken. You can then add stories to the photos, creating a “digital time machine.” Site visitors can search Historypin by topic, place and year. You can even look at pinned photos in street view to see how places have changed. So far, Historypin visitors have contributed more than 21,000 images and stories.
Make sense of modern art
Help your students better understand modern art with the help of New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The museum’s Red Studio website (http://redstudio.moma.org),
a collaboration between MoMa staff members and high school students, aims to answer questions about modern art, introduce students to modern artists and provide a behind-the-scenes tour of the museum.
The website features interviews, art history lessons and various activities for students, including Dadaist poetry and interactive collages. And, if they want to spread the art love, students can also send e-cards of famous works, such as Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night, from the site.
The dictionary gets hip
In September, the New Oxford American Dictionary was updated. Many of the “new” words and phrases are tech-related. Among the new additions:
- BFF—n. a girl’s best friend. (From the initial letters of “best friend forever.”)
- Carbon credit—n. a permit that allows a country or organization to produce a certain amount of carbon emissions. Can be traded if the full allowance is not used.
- Eggcorn—n. a word or phrase that results from a mishearing or misinterpretation of another, an element of the original being substituted for one that sounds very similar or identical (e.g., “tow the line” instead of “toe the line”).
- Hashtag—n. a hash or pound sign (#) used to identify a particular keyword or phrase in posting. (Most often used on social media sites such as Twitter.)
- Interweb—n. humorous the Internet.
- Staycation—n. informal a vacation spent in one’s home country rather than abroad, or one spent at home and involving day trips to local attractions.
- Truthiness—n. informal the quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true.
- Webisode—n. an episode, especially from a television series, or short promotional film made for viewing online.
Find more of the new and updated words at
http://blog.oup.com/2010/09/noad3.
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