What is art? Fun with Wordle.

(Image from Wordle.) This past week in my Theory of Knowledge class, we attempted to define art. Several examples were given until I re-directed the students and told them what we really needed was a definition of art, not examples of it. We sent out an email, Tweeted it, sent it out on Facebook, text messages, and any other way we could think to get our question out there. I told my students in my freshman and sophomore classes that they could get in on it if they could. Once we got our responses, I created word cloud to add to the blog as a means to help us see what the "big words" (literally) were when it came to the definition of art. It was quite an experiment, and as I've never used word clouds before, it was a good exercise for me as well. Our results are here... check it out if you get a chance, and feel free to add your definition via our comments!

A "Wordle" is worth a thousand words.

This is post number 305 on the Global Learner Blog for 2009, nearly double the posts for 2008.  The Wordle created today shows clearly where the emphasis for 21st Century Teaching & Learning lies within the GL cohort.  As this year ends please take time to congratulate yourself, other Global Learners and colleagues for dedicating yourselves to the STUDENTS in Adams 14 and Center School Districts. 

Thanks for all you do.

Wordle in reading centers

I have been doing a lot of reteaching and reviewing to cram for the upcoming testing month. This has also helped with differentiating independent work in reading centers. Last week I tried to have the students type up their word family lists in a Word doc, then copy and paste them into Wordle. Not a surprise when my heterogeneous groups bombed at this task. So this week, I pulled out some "Centers Captains" (aka grade level students) to have a private training with Wordle and how I wanted this center to work. Alas, success!

My students took their writing journals to the computers center (yes! I finally have enough computers for a center!) and typed up the word lists we had brainstormed during whole group. When they had finished the Centers Captain helped them print their sheets. As predicted, this ended up being me jumping up from guided reading to help them all print- but still worth it.

During writing the students took their Wordle print outs and highlighted them according to short vowel families and long vowel families. They used a different color highlighter to represent the different vowel word lists. Short vowels proved to be easy (since we've covered them for so long) but long vowel lists were confusing and proved to be a difficult for the students (as you will see one is not very well color coordinated).

I am going to attempt to try this activity with the phonics standard each week. It proved to be fun, but less independent than I would have liked. We'll keep trying, practice makes perfect!

Wordle

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. 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, post them to your blog or site, and save them to the Wordle gallery to share with the world. How could you use this with your students? It might be very effective. Here is a wordle generated from our very own GL Blog.