Wordled Bits

I had fun yesterday! I was at the Cue Conference in Palm Springs, CA. It's a 3-day conference for teacher nerds just like me who like to use technology in our classrooms. I could only attend one day, but that was more than I could handle as it was.

The place was packed!

(Word must have gotten out somehow that I was going to be there. I'm going to have to talk to my people about that one.)

Thankfully, my throngs of fans graciously acted as if they didn't recognize me...

...at all.

...in any way.

...like I was a nobody.

...even AFTER I asked many of them if they thought I looked like that gifted blogger Edna Lee.

Every one of them spared me the embarrassment of being recognized in public by pretending to be confused by the question.

SooooOOOOOoooo, it was easier for me to focus on all the great information being shared by techie educators from all over.

Thank you fans. I understand [wink] and appreciate your thoughtfulness.

My teaching partners (aka my "security team") and I had several criteria that we used to select which sessions to attend, since there were hundreds to choose from.

1. What we learned had to be about things that are free, meaning cost no dough, to use.

2. We need to be able to implement them with minimal prep time.

3. Our session selections should give us ideas to make our teaching easier not more complicated.

And one that came up in several of the sessions we attended was Wordle. You can make word clouds from documents or web sites. This a Wordle I made in two seconds use the URL to The Bits!

 

Ok. I was more like two hours, but that's only because I kept playing around with the fonts, layout and colors.

The larger words appear most often in the document used to create the Wordle. Smaller words appear less often.

As you can see, "pencils" are a big deal to me; "organization" not so much.

(No shock there.)

Applications for these little suckers, you ask?

Well, we thought you could use them for

• Make Wordles using student essays to identify over-used words and encourage variety in word choice.
• Brainstorm prior knowledge about content areas and focus on words that appear the smallest since those are the ones students know the least about.
• Create Wordle of adjectives for an administrator or colleague (CAREFUL, now! Don't go getting yourself fired.)
• Make a Wordle about your blog...

AND there are no restrictions on how you use your Wordle. Put 'em on t-shirts. Make a poster. Use 'em in the school paper.

Those were a few of our ideas, however I'm really more interested in your ideas. How can you see Wordle used in the classroom?

I really learned a lot at this conference. I'll try to share more of it in the coming weeks as I play around with all of it.

Happy Wordling!