Wordle – We Can!

Just had to showcase this wonderful Wordle from Kathy Cassidy’s Grade One class blog.

A great use of a Wordle. 
Every class, every child should be able to make one of these themselves. Think of the self-esteem created here!

Do you know what Wordle is? 

You take some text, whatever words you want to use, (the text from a blog post, the text from the Declaration of Independence, the text from a story a child wrote, or the text from a book, etc.) Then you insert the text into the “Magic Wordle Maker," (click on the link Wordle to get to the website) and Voila! You have a Wordle that makes words that appear most often in the text bigger than words that appear less often.  There are also tricks you can use to add special effects and finagle the way it looks and works!

By the way, did you know that the maker of Wordle, Jonathan Feinberg, listened to educators?  Teachers were cautious using Wordle with students because there are some Wordles that others have made that may not be acceptable to children viewing.  Now when you go to Wordle, you automatically get to the "Create a Wordle" page, not the page that showcases the most recent examples of Wordles that have been made!

How have you used Wordle in your classroom, with your colleagues/teachers, in your blog, in a presentation to other teachers/administrators?

Please share those.

Technorati Tags: Wordle,teachers,first grade,Kathy Cassidy,education

Literacy Revolution or More Illiteracy?

Are We Seeing More Illiteracy, Or a Literary Revolution?

from Change.org's Education Blog by Mike Smith

[Photo credit: Shareski]
Mike Smith wonders if there really is more writing going on than ever before!
I think he has a great point here.
If teachers are using the opportunities the internet and blogging allow, just possibly there is more writing going on today.
I just wrote comments to a class of first grade bloggers.  (You can too… go to Kathy Cassidy’s class blog.)
Now today their writing is not spelled well (or for some spelled at all – the teacher was the editor so we could understand what was said!), but I can’t wait to see their writing as it progresses over the school year. 
These students have an audience and they will have a reason to learn to write --- an audience of more than their parents and their teacher.  As students grow in ability and age their writing will take them many places.
These quotes taken from the blog post at Change.org Education seem to agree with my thoughts:

Clive Thompson discusses a potentially huge paradigm shift, asking whether we're seeing a literary revolution rather than increased illiteracy that's aided by Facebook, texting, and "dehydrated language."

Andrea Lunsford, professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford, suggests that young people write far more than any previous generation. Having collected and analyzed 15,000 writing samples she concludes "we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization."

Literacy is doing more than just grow in one direction: It's exploding and branching off into completely new directions.

What are you doing with your students to encourage more writing? 
How do they like it?
[As always, in my author quotes, the underlines, color changes, and bold type is mine, not the author’s!]

Technorati Tags: writing,education,Kathy Cassidy,change.org Education,Mike Smith,literacy revolution,illiteracy,texting,Facebook,language