The second part of the assignment was to make a word cloud from my reflection and to post a screenshot of it. I chose to use Wordle because it was easier to use and I thought that would be an important consideration for when I attempt to have my students use it. Easy is good! Ok, so here's my cloud:
What a fun thing! What a delicious way to play with vocabulary and organize your thoughts in a fun and creative way. I can see making a fun class book about a new word cloud from each unit of study in social studies, or the vocabulary for the chapter in math we're using, or the attributes of a character in a book we're reading. I can see doing word clouds for individual students--assign each child a different student, have them write a paragraph describing them and everything they know about him/her, then making a word cloud out of each student's paragraph and posting them around the room--making a game out of reading the words and trying to figure out whose cloud it is. I think this is a cool tool that makes something that might very well be tedious and unmotivational into something exciting and graphically creative. The ability to make them, in itself, is highly motivational, and since the words are sized by importance (decided upon by frequency of use within the writing used), I can see from a glance the most important concepts in the mind of the writer--this gives me a quick gauge to see if the students understand the concept by the words they choose and their importance in the cloud. Brilliant use of technology here. Something that seems so simple, yet is quite powerful in and of itself. You can, of course use it for the purpose for which it was intended as well--brainstorming. But no matter how you choose to use it, it's great! This has been one of my favorites!
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