Sunday, June 14, 2009

National Symbols Posters and Word Clouds



Here is an animoto video of some of our National symbols, monuments, and landmarks. Take a look at the wonderful lettering on the posters. We tried something new called "word clouds". Maybe you have seen them before on web pages. Students learned how you can make a word cloud on wordle.net and then chose important words from their project to put in their own "word cloud".

Using the "create" screen at wordle.net, you can type in words to make a word cloud, or paste in test or a report. You can also put in the URL of a website. Here are some wordle word clouds based on our blog post on our Benjamin Franklin Museum. They were simply created by pasting the text from the blog page onto the wordle "Create" page. If you don't like the design of your word cloud you can hit the randomize button to create a different version. Here are three different versions from the same words.

I can see many applications for wordle in the classroom. It seems to be an interesting way to introduce important words from or about a story.


Wordle: Untitled




Wordle: Untitled




Wordle: Untitled

4 comments:

Striving to be... Tech Savvy said...

Hello, I am new to the whole blogging thing, so I was just looking at different teacher's blogs to get ideas. I just wanted to let you know that I was very impressed with your blog and really enjoyed that you showed pictures of your students presenting their work. I will try to incorporate that into my blog since it seemed like the students really seemed proud to share their hard work.

Jim Hansen said...

Animoto.com is the presentation site you want to use. It is free for educators here: http://animoto.com/education. It is easy to use and makes your classroom presentations look and sound professional. Good luck with your blogging and teaching.
Jim

Unknown said...

Hi, I am a student majoring in the education field. I thought your blog was very good and interesting. I really liked a lot of your ideas!

Jim Hansen said...

Thanks Lauren,
Good luck with your future in eductaion. Teaching can be a lot of fun, if you make it fun, and it is a very rewarding career.
Jim