Wordle in Careers 10

I had fun today applying wordle in my Careers 10 class.  I plan to use the idea of Tony Borach to use wordle as a pre-assessment and post-assessment tool, but, for now my students had just completed three weeks of portfolio work and personal assessments, so they were able to gather all the words to describe themselves in their own creation.  They loved playing with the colors and random settings and were proud of their final results.  I couldn't figure how to just save the final result, but here is a link that includes a little more than just Shannon's final summary.         http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/5776814/Me

For my first blog review, I did some reading of The Tech Savvy Educator:  http://www.techsavvyed.net/

Ben Rimes, who calls himself a TechSavvyEd Blogger, is a K-12 Technology Coordinator for Mattawan Consolidated School District in Michigan

I was totally intrigued by his blog because of the challenge he brings to educators to learn more about technology, but, especially, because he teaches how to use technology in the classroom in a very practical way.  Teachers can very easily find archived blogs and video teaching clips for many subjects, including Art, English, Language arts, music, Social Studies, Science, and even Assessment.  As an example, for Art, I found instruction on creating an online photo gallery of student work, creating classroom posters, simplifying stories into icons, and using the app “Echograph” on an iPad.

Under the archived blogs for Assessment, I was most intrigued by his discussion on the use of Wordle in the classroom.  Using the heading, “A Highly Effective use of Wordle in The Classroom,” Ben Rimes talked about how he was often disappointed by all the information on the web which just reinforced ineffective use of technology in the classrooms. He then shared how he was delighted to find Tony Borach’s blog which didn’t just teach students to play with word clouds but to begin a discussion about magnets and create a word play as a pre-test.  Later, after a lesson and sharing experiences, these students were encouraged to create another word cloud that would reflect the learning. http://tborash.posterous.com/designing-lessons-using-wordle

 I appreciated how Ben Rimes was very willing to share any practical application he had found.