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.
