Hello LM_NETTERS,
A teacher in our area wanted to know the name of this site. So I put these
thought together for our tl listserv and I thought I would pass this on to
this group too. I hope that it is useful.
Many of you know the Wordle site- a word cloud site.
http://www.wordle.net/
A useful hint. To have words stay together that you want together such as
North America- you must put a tilde between the words - no spaces e.g.,
North~America The tilde mark is the upper case mark on the key beside the
numeral 1. You can link more than two words.
It is a great way for you to assess kids' understanding after a unit by this
being printed as a title page instead of the somewhat useless exercise of
having them do title pages at the beginning of the unit.
I n a literacy lesson in the library I modeled the use of Wordle to the
grade 8s last year by having them brainstorm what they knew about Sir
Wilfrid Laurier (a former Canadian Prime Minister for our non-Canadian
friends) after they had just finished learning about him. They then were
responsible for adding a similar list/Wordle about their personal study of
a history topic in that era to their wiki page.
Another hint is to have them list the words in MSWord first. They then can
copy and then paste the words as many times indicating the important
concepts with more times repeated. The more times repeated the bigger the
words get in the Wordle program. This was modeled with the Sir Wilfrid
Laurier example. As a group we had to think critically to determine the
level of importance of the items to the list once it was created. Then copy
the list into Wordle-- this allows for perfect spelling as well. If you
added what you type directly into Wordle and then find a mistake, you will
have to type it all over again. And we do know how patient intermediate
students are.
The grade 8s used this as a page for their section of the yearbook this
year. They listed all of the things that were important to them that year.
It was a nice summary of what was important to them.
I am thinking out loud right now-- This could be a good exercise for the
start of the new year to do with classes to introduce Wordle in the reverse
of what our grade 8s did-- Ask the students "What do you expect from being
in Grade _? or "What do you feel like on your first day of Grade __? Do the
modelling, print and give to the teacher as a preassessment of the group.
Primary students might list 10 things that are important to them, or a
meaningful topic for discussion.
This covers: a modelled lesson, content are topic, diagnostic or formative
assessment, critical thinking, and intro to a valid use of Information
Technology.
Pat Elliott
Teacher-Librarian
Hewitt's Creek P.S.
Barrie, ON Canada
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