Thursday, January 22, 2009

Wordle and the Presidents

What is a Wordle? My elementary technology students are learning to create and format lots of them. For our purposes, a Wordle is a word cloud that shows main ideas and details of your selected text. We chose inauguration speeches for a hallway display titled Guess the President.



It is becoming a big hit - especially after Mrs. L Smith, a 4th grade teacher, who correctly guessed one of Lilli's (her student) Wordle as Abraham Lincoln's speech. She explained the clues that she used to make her great guess! Her students were delighted that she joined in the fun in their technology class and came up with more ways to use Wordle to improve their writing. Other teachers are also brainstorming ways to use Wordle in their classes.

Today - unexpected music to my ears from a new student who asked, "Can I do this at home too?"

The Wordle above is not from Abraham Lincoln's speech. Can you make a good guess? What are some more ways to use Wordle in your classroom?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I know who the Wordle is from only because I Wordle'd that speech multiple times myself. lol

I love hearing that the students are engaged and actually WANT to do it at home too! YEAH!

Anonymous said...

Thank you for the wonderful ideas with Wordle, I am a technology teacher and have been inspired by your suggestions. I am going to assign each student a science topic(from their book) and have them create a Wordle for it. Earlier this year my students composed a Wordle describing themselves, they loved that but then I put Wordle on my idea shelf. I think students could even write book reports utilizing Wordle. The ideas are flying into my head. Thank you