My web 2.0 tool for this week is Wordle. (www.wordle.com) We were introduced to this tool in a previous class, but I’ve found more than just fun uses for it in the classroom.Here’s a very simple example of what you can do with Wordle. I took a newsletter for m parents and copied and pasted all the text into Wordle. I hit create and voila!
The words that repeat in the text get bigger the more times they are in the text.
Another thought I had was to use this as an anticipation guide for an up coming unit. One of the big themes for us in third grade is Kenosha. I spend all year covering the history of the city and it’s people. We take a lot of field trips to Kenosha landmarks and even visit a cemetery. This would be a good tool to get the kids excited about learning Kenosha’s history.
Another interesting idea I had would be to use it for vocabulary lessons. You could copy all the vocabulary words into a word cloud and have the students highlight the ones they learn as they learn them.
Here’s another thought, students tend to use a lot of the same words over and over again in a paper. Have them copy and paste the paper into Wordle. The words they use the most will be the biggest and they can then go into their paper and try to modify the use of those words.
A final idea (and I used this one last year). The students in my classroom wrote about their year in third grade. They wrote about their favorite parts, field trips, what they learned and what I could do better as a teacher. I took all the positive writings and pasted them into Wordle. (I kept their feedback to me for next year.) I them created my word cloud and added it to the iMovie about our year together at the end.
Andrea, I really like every idea that you posted for the use of Wordle. The idea that you gave regarding the overuse of words within a paper would definitely be a great use of Wordle for students to see that for themselves without really having to reread and look for those words. This is a great tool to help them expand their vocabulary and not rely on those same words. In cases like this, I have my students create a banned word list. They create a list of words that they are not allowed to use within a paper because they just use them too much.
ReplyDeleteThe other idea that you mention that I would like to implement is the positive writings that reflect experiences over the course of the year. These would be great when doing a self evaluation as the teacher ( for how well the year went), but it would also be great as an introduction to the students that you have for the next year, sharing with them things that former students really enjoyed. Good job, and thanks for sharing.
Thanks Diane, I just started playing around with Wordle as the year was ending. I do plan on using it more this year.
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