Wordle Pre-Read Activity

Last week, I was sauntering down the hallway to a Spanish classroom but had to make a quick pit-stop into an 8th grade English classroom because of what I saw on the board. As I peered into her small, classroom window, I noticed a Wordle on her board. Now, I have used Wordle in the past, but not the creative way that she was using it with her 8th grade students. I had always used wordle after I taught a lesson to review big concepts. 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."

The 8th grade English teacher was about to start a new novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, with her students, but instead of reading the back cover or filling out a KWL chart, she took the summary of the book and pasted it into wordle to create an image of the summary. The class had a great discussion because of it. She simply said, "Tell me what you think this novel is going to be about and why?" Student responses included:

"I think the main character is going to be someone named Scout because that word is really big."

"The book must be centered around a school with children and maybe Maycomb is the city in which the book takes place."

Other ideas of how to use Wordle in your classroom:

• biographies
• auto-biographies
• book reports
• essay writing- Imagine trying to teach students the importance of varying your sentences. Many times students want to start sentences with "I." To see if their essays are varied, have them put their essay in a wordle and make sure the word I is not the largest word on the wordle. Discuss how the main character, theme or location should be the biggest words. 
• speeches- what words were most important
• Vocabulary- give students new words and have them come up with as many words as they can that are associated with that word and create a wordle
• along with a survey- Survey students using google forms and put results into Wordle to clearly see the favorite

Awesome website with 125 ideas on how to use Wordle.

https://21centuryedtech.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/word-clouds-125-ways-and-counting-to-use-wordle-in-the-classroom/

Authentic Learning

While teaching, we always want to find ways to make our lessons authentic as often as possible. A colleague was teaching scale to her middle school, math students. After learning about scale, the students took a page from a coloring book and scaled it down on grid paper. Take that one step further... authentic learning with an authentic audience, but how? Students were then asked to respond to the following discussion post:
Now that you have learned about scale and how to scale drawings, what careers use scale on a daily basis? Give specific examples.

One step further... the teacher will be bringing in professionals who use scale in their daily lives and provide examples for the students to see and discuss. Authentic. Learning. 

Screencastomatic

"One-click screen capture recording on Windows or Mac computers with NO INSTALL FOR FREE!" Like music to my ears! I always want to try out new ways to capture teaching but there always seems to be something that has to be installed. 

Screencast-o-matic might be the easiest, most user-friendly screen cast website I have ever used. You literally go to www.screencastomatic.com, click start recording and it counts down 3-2-1. You record your screen, webcam or both, save the recording to your computer. Done. And yes, it is truly that easy! We have used screencastomatic many times. Examples:

• teacher creates a screencast with his/her voice recording a lesson using Microsoft word
• teacher creates a screencast of a you tube video, pausing to point out important points throughout the video
• teacher creates a screencast then uploads to edpuzzle to incorporate questions throughout the lesson to check for understanding and give immediate feedback

Other ideas:

• have students create screencasts to explain a topic taught in class
• students create screencasts on different topics, then do a "walk around share" where students walk from desk-to-desk watching different screencasts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jADJ_OoSnm8

Math in a French Classroom Using Socrative

3 - 1 = 2 is usually heard in a math classroom, but not today! Today, you can hear math being used in a French classroom as the students review numbers in French. Cross-curricular teaching right there, ladies and gentlemen! 

I have been working alongside the French teacher to find ways to give her students instant feedback during class time. The 5th graders have been learning their numbers in French and what a better way to do this than by using Socrative? The lesson started out with your simply, "What number is (insert number in French- I don't speak a lick of French!)?" and the students would respond on Socrative with the correct answer. But then, she turned it up a notch! Instead of simply asking for a direct translation, the teacher forced them to put on their math hats alongside their berets. She would say (Once again, she was speaking in French) "What number is 4 + 5?" Without a tool like Socrative, you would have asked the question, waited for a student to raise his/her hand, and had one student respond. Socrative allows for all students to respond at once without seeing each others' answers and the teacher instantly knows if the students have mastered the concept or if it needs to be retaught or reviewed. 

www.socrative.com

From Educreations to Edpuzzle

In an earlier post, I explained the benefits of using edpuzzle and shared the idea of using your own, pre-made videos. However, when working with a teacher on my campus with the idea of taking her educreations videos that she has made in the past and placing them in edpuzzle to add questions throughout her videos, we faced a problem... Educreations and edpuzzle do not communicate. You can't upload an educreations video as easily as you can a you tube or vimeo video. We did some research and found a way around this issue. 

How to turn an Educreations video into an Edpuzzle

1. Using your iPad, save educreations video to camera roll.
2. Open the You Tube “Capture” App and select the video that you saved to your camera roll and give it a name.
3. Once the video has uploaded, be sure that the privacy is set to public.
4. Near the top of the screen you will see the link. Click on the link and “copy to clipboard.”
5. Go to safari and sign in to Edpuzzle.
6. Click on search and paste the link you copied to the clipboard in the space. (If a screen comes up that says, “Oops! There was a problem with the video,” go back to the capture app and reselect public. Once you reselct public, copy the link to clipboard again. Go back to Edpuzzle and paste.)
7. Now that the video is uploaded to Edpuzzle, you will need to log on to edpuzzle on a desktop as iPads do not have flash plug ins.

Edpuzzle Excitement

Taken from www.edpuzzle.com

Awesome, innovative, creative way to take an already made video from the web (think youtube, vimeo...) OR your own video that you have created (educreations, show me...) and deepening students' learning and understanding by inputing questions throughout the video. To top that off, edpuzzle gives you a class code for each class you create that you can share with you students and it monitors their progress. Instant feedback! As your students watch the video and answer the questions throughout the video, edpuzzle shows them the correct answers instantly. There is also great feedback on the teacher end that lets you know exactly what you need to reteach or review with your students. 

Generally, edpuzzle is created by the teacher to teach and assess students. But how great would it be to have students be the teachers? 

Example) 

Lesson- Teaching students about the founding of Jamestown. Instead of you finding the youtube video that explains the founding of Jamestown and inputing edpuzzle questions throughout the video, have students find or create Jamestown videos and input edpuzzle questions throughout the videos to then share with their classmates.

Great video on how to create an edpuzzle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGjP7QrNo7U

Blogging in an Art Class

Yes. You read that correctly. Blogging in an art class. Why?

Portfolios are not new in an art classroom; however, the way that we create our portfolios can be. Imagine students being able to share their artwork with family members across the nation and being able to do this with a click of a mouse. Our students spend one, nine-week grading period in art in 5^th grade, a semester in art in 6^th grade and potentially an entire year in art in 7^th – 12^th grade should they choose it as their artwork. This year, our students will be creating blogs using blogger to act as an online portfolio to showcase their artwork throughout their career as an artist. It will be shared with family members and potentially, colleges or universities.

Students will set up a blogger account to use at school. Blogger accounts can be set up in many different ways:

Public, anyone can view and comment

Public, anyone can view but comments are moderated until published

Private, only people who are invited to read the blog can view the blog

Students will use the blog to publish their work during the beginning, middle and completed stages. They can also reflect on their thought process while creating their artwork. What a great way to create an authentic audience and receive feedback!