Cool Tool: WORDLE

The cool tool I chose for this week is "Wordle"

According to www.wordle.net, "wordle is a toy for generating "word clouds" from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to your own desktop to use as you wish. "

I chose this tool because I want my students to be not just smart and dedicated but also creative. I am a really motivated person who loves to remember why I do things and what do I need to achieve my goals. I have post-it all over my walls in one way or another.

I would use this tool in classroom with no doubt. First of all I will spend once a week to make a project with my students. I would put tables together and create groups of 5 people. I would make them to do a creative poster and every week I would give them a topic.

For instance:

Week 1: poster about what makes a team to work well and be efficient. They would have to think about different words and put it together.

Week 2: motivational words. I would put the best 3 posters on the wall of the class.

Week 3: what characterizes a good student.

I really think kids will have fun doing this activity. Also they will learn to respect turns, comment, give opinions as well as respect different points of view. But the main goal is to have fun while learning.

Since I am far from home and I don't know children in Akron, I did Skype with my nephew, who is 7 years old, and I explained to him this activity. I told him that he should think about words that describe a good student. This is the result:

Obviously, my nephew does not know how to speak in English so he sent it to me in Spanish. Here he says:

Study, do the homework, dedication, work, time, organization, respect, silence in class, listen to the teacher, help classmates, ask if I have questions, have fun.

As soon as I read everything I couldn't wait to ask him why he said respect and have fun. If you read my blog every week you should know I love the sentence "having fun". Well  he said: " respect because I have to respect my teacher", I said why and he said: because she is the one who teach me and just because of this, she deserves my respect." I FREAKED OUT

Then I asked why he said "have fun" he said: because you always tell me that if I have fun, everything is easier and better. I FREAKED OUT AGAIN!

Regarding the TPACK and my tool, they are related 100%. First of all, as a teacher I have the knowledge about the subject matter I am going to teach. The content to be covered of kids from 4th grade is different from kids of high school.

Secondly, with this activity I have goals as a teacher: have fun while learning. Make them think, be more creative and enlarge their vocabulary.

Thirdly, to use this tool I need to be in touch with...technology! They will learn how to manage this tool through a laptop, computer or tablet.

Finally, I will see the difference and I will understand ( or I hope so) how teaching and learning can change through using technology.

Students, at the end of the explanation, will be able to use this app to create their own digital media artifacts. If they don't learn how to manage it, I'll explain as many times as they need to achieve my goal: create a poster and have fun. It makes easy to use this tool because the task is very easy. You just need to tape the words you want to see in the poster and then, click in "go". Then you will see the post with the words you taped. Students will change in so many ways but the most important is that they will be more interested in class and they will learn how to pick words when every students think different. They will have to agree at the end.

You can find this tool in the following link:

http://www.wordle.net/create

HAVE FUN!