Loisath-My ICT Journey

I have already written about Wordle, the application that makes beautiful word clouds, and how it can be used in your classroom. Here are some more ideas on how to use Wordle with your students thanks to Angelia Myers and The Top 20 Uses for Wordle in the Classroom presented by Rodd Lucier. The following are my favourites for a primary classroom

1. Combine student ‘Who Are You?’ introductions, or ‘Superhero
   Traits‘ to develop a class composite;
2. Condense survey data by dumping content of questionnaire responses into the Wordle engine;
3. Combine news articles or RSS feeds on a given topic;
4. Turn an essay into a poster;

Now try and finish the poem using the words in the Wordle.

Whole Duty of Children by Robert Louis Stevenson

A child should always say ______ ____,
And _____ when he is spoken to,
And behave _______ __ ___ _____:

At _____ as far as he is able.

Just for fun – Guess the following famous Australian songs:

Wordle is…

Wordle lets you create artistic word clouds with your writing or just a bunch of words that you might choose to use  to describe something. It will give greater prominence to the more frequent words

and exclude the “stop words” (words too common to visualise). The colors and designs can be customised, its free and your Wordle is yours to do as you want with it! How good is that.

Some uses for Wordle

• If you put your student’s writing into Wordles over a period of time you could see if their vocabulary is developing and if they are using subject specific language so it is possible to use Wordle as an assessment tool.
• I’ve used it as a form of art work mixed with photos and for backgrounds on pages in the school magazine. It was a great way to highlight the key words for my subject in an interesting way that would catch the readers attention with a glance.
• Use it to summarise a piece of writing.

Suggestions from the SMARTboard lessons podcast

• It could be a springboard for predicting texts. Copy a couple of key paragraphs of a text that you are using with your students to create a Wordle and then let the students predict what the text might be about and they can become familiar with unfamiliar words before beginning their reading.
• Comparing texts a lesson for secondary schools.

If you have any suggestions please add them in the comments for others to share.

Planning week has been a perfect time to get staff on board with Google Docs and Delicious. Staff can share their Inquiry Plan online and make changes together. Add to this that the Specialist staff members can also add to the document with the hassel of email or the worry about which is the most up to date document.

I look forward to getting to the stage that our school can use Google Docs with the students. Tom Barrett’s blog, “So can I use Google Docs at home? “ (http://tbarrett.edublogs.org) about the way he is developing the use of Google tools with his class demonstrates how powerful and useful they can be as a teaching and learning tool.

We (our school) will have to change the way that we access the Internet because at the moment Google is blocked for students! I think it is the beginning of a culture change too because we have not encouraged students to sign up for online subscriptions, in fact we positively discouraged it.

Staff now have the Delicious Add Ons so that they can bookmark easily. It is a pity that the Delicious site has dropped out twice now just when staff were about to see how clever it could be. I am encouraging staff to have an account for their grade as well. They would then be able to direct their students to their Delicious account to use the sites with a certain tag.

We have begun our Web2.0 journey but have such a long way to go….