The art of writing, anything other than research papers and birthday cards, has always been an intimidating experience to me...especially the first step of putting pen to paper. This in itself is ironic as I am schooled to be a reading and writing instructor. This daunting experience once again found its way into my life, in the form of this blog...a requirement for one of my Fall 2010 courses. And may I at this point just mention that I never thought that I would EVER have to write a blog, thank you Prof. X. Definitely a first for me, but you have to try most things in life at least once, right? I remembered a quote I read by Darwin P. Kingsley and thought...blogging, I can do this! Part of the quote with particular reference to my situation reads:
"You can do things that you never thought you could do. There are no limitations in what you can do except the limitations of your own mind" (Darwin P. Kingsley, http://thinkexist.com/quotes/Darwin_P._Kingsley).
So with that, welcome to my blog!
Essentially, this blog will contain ideas, debates, hesitations and (more importantly) excitement about various technologies and their role in the reading and writing classroom. Perhaps then, it would be fitting to talk about the first week of class. In the course that requires this blog, we used Wordle as part of an introductory activity. Although this was a fun and creative activity, I could easily envisage using Wordle in my writing classroom. Wordle rearranges the key words of a text in a random, colorful and creative way (well, actually it provides you with options such as font, color, direction, etc.). Apart from its potential uses in vocabulary building exercises, one could ask students to recreate a text using the key words, placing emphasis on coherence and cohesion. Another potential use of Wordle is that it can be used in a brainstorming session, where students are presented with a topic and as a class they brainstorm ideas. The teacher then enters these ideas into Wordle, and the program generates a visual representation of the key words entered. This can then be given to the students to activate background knowledge before writing or to help them get started with providing some ideas.
That's it for this week. I look forward to sharing my discoveries with you on this new adventure!
I am actually glad that you are having this experience --- new things to discover. Isn't it interesting that we, as teachers, have no problem assigning a journal, paper, etc. to students even when we know we don't like to do it!! I can't help but think of that as I read your first entry -- you never know, by the end of class you might see some value in this for students in your future classrooms. Thanks for sharing additional ideas that you had on using Wordle!
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