Using Wordle in Classroom Lessons

April 12-18 is National Library Week. Show your appreciation to your library media specialist by creating a Wordle word cloud. Review the post I created earlier where I mentioned Wordle as a neat tool for the classroom. Here are some ideas for using Wordle in lesson activities from Jonathan Wylie.

Create a Wordle Gift: Input your favorite adjectives for your librarian, generate the word cloud, and add it to a greeting card, poster, calendar, or whatever else you choose. This can be a class gift with each student adding one or more words to a poster.

Other ideas for using Wordle include: historical document analysis, student profiles, compare and contrast activities, unit review and preview posters and more. Try some of these ideas in your lessons to give visualization to some of the concepts you are teaching.

Enter the Video Science Challenge

An interesting and motivating way to challenge students at the 5th to 8th grade level to become more involved in science is the 2010 Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge, sponsored by Discovery Education and 3M Corporation. The video only has to be one to two minutes on a topic emphasizing “safety and security.” Each entry must be individual and explain the science behind the danger and the science, technology, engineering and/or mathematics behind a possible solution.

Some sample topics include food safety, spread of germs, protection from the sun to name a few. Sample videos and lesson plans are also available on the site. Visit the 2010 Video Topics to learn all about the requirements, entry regulations and date of submission. If you have students interested in science here’s a way to stimulate that interest. More on this topic and how to create videos on my Web site.

New Additions to Web Site

New additional have been added to my Web site Bev's Educational Website that accompanies my book Using Web 2.0 Tools in the K-12 Classroom.

--Enter the Video Science Challenge contains information about an individual science project for middle school students as well as Web sites that offer free resources to get started using video in the classroom. The project is similar to Science Fair projects with video as the main tool.

--New wiki projects for the social studies.

Improve your English: An ESL tip

If your native language is not English, the easiest way to improve your speaking and listening skills is to practice every day. Perhaps you don’t have a partner to speak to every day. At Elllo you can listen to videos recorded by speakers from all over the world on topics of interest, for example, what is my favorite pizza or is your country multicultural? In addition, a written transcript can help you improve your reading skills and learn vocabulary you may not know. A quiz tests your knowledge of grammar requiring you to put in the correct form of a word. Other videos emphasize vocabulary—do you know what the “crust” of a pizza is?

You can find more tips and suggested projects to use with ESL students in my books Using Web 2.0 Tools in the K-12 Classroom (Chapter 7) and Internet Workshops: 10 Ready-to-do Workshops for K-12 Educators (Workshop 8).

New posts each week

Watch for new posts each week highlighting new curriculum ideas using technology, new technologies, lesson ideas and more. To participate send me your comments, ways you are using technology with your students, successes and innovate ideas.

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Using Wikis – New Projects

Essential questions activities usually lend themselves well to multidisciplinary investigations, requiring that students apply the skills and perspectives of math and language arts while wrestling with content from social studies or science. Two new projects emphasize the use of Wikis, collaboration, and inter-disciplinary learning.

Take advantage of some exciting new Wiki projects put together by Vicki Davis at Westwood Schools. Ms. Davis, teacher and author of the Cool Cat Teacher blog , has a wiki-centric classroom as shown in a previous example on the Flat Classroom in Chapter 4, page 65 of my book Using Web 2.0 Tools in the K-12 Classroom.

Click Current Events to review two new projects, ideal for social studies, history, mathematics and English/language arts: 1) Arab-Israeli Conflict Simulation: Political Reality in the Classroom, a joint project with the University of Michigan and 2) Stock Market Simulation.

All the material is available so you, too, can create your own Wiki project. Send me your comments! I'd love to hear from you.

• Website: http://aic.conflix.org/ - A joint project with the University of Michigan. Six teams will participate on the project this year.
• Stock Market Game: http://www.vse.marketwatch.com/Game/Homepage.aspx

Security for Google Apps for Educators

Security is included free for K-12 schools and districts who add the service Google Apps by July 2010. Security allows administrators to easily set-up and manage group email policies and create robust content filters. http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=159594

My book "Using Web 2.0 Tools in the K-12 Classroom" has a chapter on using Google Tools in the classroom--this is a new feature you will want to check out. After all, security is an important factor when using the Internet with K-12 students.