Sunday, July 20, 2008

Students & Learning First


Have you played with Wordle? Well, I finally had a chance to explore this free tool 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.
I inserted my blog address and ended up with the Wordle above which confirms a commitment to putting Students and Learning first. Those two words are the most prominent in the writings of my blog, followed by "recommendations" and "research." I am excited to see that the message I am trying to convey through my blog is corroborated by a fun tool.

Consider trying this amusing exercise with your students after they have completed a written assignment.

You both may be surprised by the results. And you just might get lengthier written work from your previously reluctant writers.

4 comments:

Hatchet Blog Project said...

Karen, I just wanted to let you know how much I enjoy reading your blog. As a new middle school teacher, I find your thoughts, comments, and information refreshing and thought provoking. Thank you for all the hard work that I'm sure goes into your blog...it is very much appreciated.
Nancy Plisko

Karen Janowski said...

Nancy,
Thank you for your kind words. As you embark on your adventure as a teaching professional, remember to always model learning in your classroom. We are all teachers/learners and can have a profound influence on our students.
Karen

Lisa Parisi said...

I like the idea of having students do a wordle on their blog. Tried one on mine. http://lisaslingo.blogspot.com/

Paul Hamilton said...

Wordle really is an engaging tool. It not only creates an interesting and visually appealing product, it's a lot of fun. In a course I recently helped to teach, I used Wordle on several pieces of work I shared with a group of 38 teachers. It turned out that many of the teachers were engaged to the point of choosing to create Wordles for themselves, without any urging at all from me. Wordle is just an example of the growing number of tools that have great potential to engage learners in our classrooms. --Paul