Word(le) clouds, Paint pictures

Wordle cloud, Paint fish

Here's one that came from one of the sessions on our CELTA course in the last week...

I suggested Ananova.com (specifically the bizarre news stories in its Quirkies section) as a great default home page for both teachers and learners, with the Dead angler becomes fish food story an example of a text you could do in class.

We then took the story -- assuming that we'd already "done" the text in class -- to Wordle.net and converted it into a cloud. By a bit of simple editing, first with Wordle, then with Paint (which we used to add an eye to create a word cloud fish), we've then converted the text into a picture which we could use to decorate a class blog.

As I suggested earlier, I still have my doubts about using Wordle as a classroom activity -- principally because your learners will be manipulating the image, but not the words themselves: they want to be tinkering with the language not just looking at it, if we want people to learn language.

But as an "after reading" activity, to add some color to a class blog, to add some fun, you might still justify it...

And as one of you pointed out in at least one of the sessions this week, we might also possibly use the word cloud as either a prediction or a reconstruction activity...

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Technology assistants: help is at hand

Toni Walton Atela (15) tells his sister (12) about a job he's volunteered for at school -- being a "technology assistant".

You're getting hot and sweaty in front of your class, trying to get a PowerPoint presentation to open on the beastly piece of junk that masquerades as a computer (which seems to work fine for other people...)? If you were teaching in my sons's school, help would be sitting there in the classroom next door...

It might not work as well in a language school (with kids there only a couple of hours a week) but, if you work in a "normal" secondary school, it takes some of the pressure off the teacher. You're not that good with technology...? You're afraid it's not going to work...? Get some help...!

And it puts the responsibility on the kids. Now, that's got to be a good thing, too...

Links landing in my mail box

All of the following links came to me via the excellent Developing Teachers.com Monthly Newsletter for July.

• 50 Things Everyone Should Know How To Do, which might make a great discussion topic before your learners ever look at the site: Can they brainstorm their own list...? Once they get to the site, How many did they correctly predict...? And once they do get there, they'll find some fascinating reading
  
• The story of Jamie Livingston, who took a polaroid every day until the day he died, which (though you might want to limit it to, say, 30 days) would make a great project if you had a class blog -- get your learners to take the picture, in other words, and publish them together with a suitable, accompanying text describing the picture
  
• I was less impressed by StickyBall.net, which has games, jokes, vocab lists, worksheets and so on, though you might find things you could use.
  

The difference between the first two, above, and StickyBall is an important one, I think: in the first two cases, you would be getting your students to do things. In the latter case, it would be you downloading, printing and photocopying, to a considerable extent. Doing will produce learning, photocopying is much less likely to, if you ask me.

Don't go looking for things on the Internet, I always say: have things come to you. The DT Monthly Newsletter always brings lot...