Wordle

I love Wordle and I've learned two things I didn't know. My favorite is that if I want to create a Wordle about Project Based Learning I can keep those words together (rather than being separated and showing up randomly) by typing a tilde between the words...Project~Based~Learning. The other thing I picked up was that if I want to show importance I can do that by typing the word I want to be largest more times. For example if one of my students were creating a description of himself he could type the word creative~thinker ten times. Then "creative thinker" would appear largest in the Wordle. Kids could take polls of classmates about how a character changed in a book or what was a character's most outstanding character trait. Then type in all the traits that were mentioned by everyone. If three children thought the character was honest, type honest three times, if seven children thought the character was compassionate, type compassionate seven times. The Wordle then shows a class representation of the character study. There are many more ideas I discovered on the web sites Sandy suggested but I will have to get back to this tomorrow.
By the way there are now 38 Ways to Use Wordle in Education...up 25! What fun!

Here are a few things I'd like to try in 2009-2010. In the beginning of the year the fourth grade team has their students list three things they hope people would say about them. After doing this I'd have them circle their most important one and I would type all twenty-one into Wordle. I'd let the children draw conclusions about the attributes they value.

I'd also like to explore Etherpad which a tool in which the children write collaboratively. Perhaps they could make a collaborative top-ten list of what is going to be the greatest about fourth grade. These lists could be placed into Wordle and then students could write about what surprised them on the list.

Currently Jaclyn, Leslie and I introduce each of the books in our Jerry Spinelli author study (Maniac Magee, Wringer and Stargirl) with "book bits." We type up twenty to twenty-five quotes from one of the books and cut them apart and then place each strip face up on the student tables. The children quietly walk around the room and read each one and then write predictions about the book. These predictions could be copied and pasted into Wordle to see what words and ideas stand out. Then the children could revise their predictions.

In writing I see lots of possibilities. When I teach the Ideas trait the children learn to show rather than tell what happens. It would be helpful to copy and paste a student-written paragraph into Wordle and see what details are used. A child could also hunt for tired words. When the voice/word choice trait is introduced, a page from a Sharon Creech book could be copied and pasted into Wordle and the resulting graphic could be evaluated by groups of children for voice or word choice.