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- Stacy Mothershed on Workshop Reflections: Writing in Social Studies Day #1
- Brenda Smith on Workshop Reflections: Writing in Social Studies Day #1
- Stacy Mothershed on Workshop Reflections: Writing in Social Studies Day #1
- RjWassink on Workshop Reflections: Writing in Social Studies Day #1
- Beth Still on Workshop Reflections: Writing in Social Studies Day #1
Wordles: One Idea Leads to Another
One of the great things about being the ISTE 10 Newbie is that I am meeting great people and learning new things almost daily. Recently Beth Still blogged about a book called Guess the Wordle and introduced me to the one of the authors – Jen Wagner. As a result I purchased the book and spent some time dwelling on Wordles and how I can apply them to my 8th grade Social Studies Class.
Jen’s awesome book got me thinking of several different ways that I can utilize this free service in my classroom.
Some ideas:
1. Review for a vocabulary quiz: Make a Wordle from the definition and have students guess the term. Students should also explain how they came up with their answer
2. End of year review: Create a Wordle from a set of terms related to a particular unit and have students identify the unit. Again I think that having students explain their answers – even though they might be wrong is where the true learning comes into play.
3. Class Starter: I have a Promethean ActivBoard in my room and every day I give the kids something to do upon entering the classroom. I could put up a Wordle that relates to the theme of the day and have my students write down their guess and an explanation.
What are some of the ways that you use Wordles in your classroom?
July 25th, 2009 at 2:25 am
Smiles –
thanks for the nice write up.
Level 2 should be coming out on Wednesday of next week and Level 3 that weekend.
It has been a learning experience for myself and my co-hort, Kathy Shields, as we make the harder levels.
I like your review idea — love the vocabulary idea.
and look forward to meeting you in Denver 2010.
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July 25th, 2009 at 2:28 am
I used Wordle with my 4th graders this past Spring. They were involved in a project with a 4th grade from another city. The other school came to ours but when it was time to visit their school, the swine flu was floating around our school district. We had to cancel the trip. My 4th graders created Wordles for their pen pals with all the words they could think of to describe their year long project. The kids loved it and the teachers thought it was the coolest tool!
One piece of advice- You never know what kinds of Wordles will be showing in the gallery on the main page so I bookmarked the create page instead of the home page for the students to access.
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