First- WORDLE! Oh my, what an amazing tool; one that I'm so disappointed I didn't know about during my student teaching. This tool puts words in a very visual, if
not artistic, format. I've included an example of a wordle I might have my students create in my classroom. For this lesson I would have student create a wordle word cloud for rhyming words/word families. For younger students we might make this as a class, or possibly make the list as a class and then each student could make their own. For older children each child, or pairs of children, could each receive a different family and make a word cloud. I could also see the potential of this lesson to be used as an assessment. For my worlde example I did the 'at' family. The possibilities are endless! (ps... fun website- I was trying to find additional words to rhyme with at and came across www.rhymezone.com- this might be fun to use with tuttees instead of purchasing a rhyming dictionary!)Second, COMIC LIFE! Gosh, yet another excellent tool for the classroom. In class we used it in correlation with one of our favorite books. This program was particularly useful for one of my new favorites- Hinky Pinkys. This is a student made book where they wrote rhyming riddles. I really saw potential for comic life to be used for making hinky pinky pages. In the book the answer to th
e riddle is upside down at the bottom of the page- not always an easy task to accomplish in Microsoft Word. However words and pictures are very, very easily manipulated in Comic Life, not to mention how easily adaptable the formats are to the original hinky pinky pages. I looked up the website for Comic Life on http://www.eusd4kids.org/edtech/xapps/xapps_comic.html that we were told we should go to during class. There are some student examples and I've included one in this blog. These student used the book stellaluna and created a summary with comic life. They also evidently used digital cameras. What a technology-filled lesson!Note: I love blogger.com! While writing this blog I accidentally 'x-ed' out the tab- gasp! However the blog auto saves :-) 5 stars!
I completely agree with you! The discovery of the technologies available for us to use such as: Wordle and Comic Life are incredible! I really appreciate the website you posted also! I was close to purchasing a rhyming dictionary but am excited to use that instead! Your activity with rhyming words on Wordle would be a great one to use with children of different ages!
ReplyDeleteWith all that we have learned in the first week of class, I'm sure we are going to learn several more ways to integrate technology in our classrooms.
I definitely like your idea in this post. Use of technology is another way we can communicate with each other, and kids can benefit from application of technological skills in the classroom learning. For example, visualization in Wordle can provide kids with different ways of delivering their intended/unintended meanings to others. Therefore, simply summarizing the reading on a piece of paper can be totally different from that in Wordle with different fonts and colors in audience’ understanding of the summary. Telling the class a story from Comic Life can increase the class’ engagement and excitement about listening to the story. In conclusion, I would say that integrating technology into our pedagogy and content can positively create a variety of ways of delivering meanings, communicating with each other, and eliciting kids’ interests in learning.
ReplyDeleteYou are doing just fine with blogger... Great post! Love your idea for Wordle - that is exactly what I want you to do --- see what your response partners are learning from you?
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