Word clouds are fun ways to get students thinking creatively about any topic. The problem is that it’s sometimes difficult to find the one that best meets your needs. Lucky for you, we’ve taken the dirty work out of it and compiled The 5 Best Free Word Cloud Creation Educational Tools for Teachers! Utilize these free educational technology tools to get your students’ minds immersed in any new topic.
Dennis T OConnor's insight:
Brainstorm, revise, word choice, organize... all in a playful environment. Engagement with the writing process is a sweet thing.
We, the denizens of the Web, who live and work here also call them as tag clouds. Call them “word clouds” or “tag clouds” – they are visualization tools that helps your brain process information in a rather unique way.
This program provides writing exercises to help students expand small moments in time by using vivid detail, thoughtshots, and snapshots. Alternatively, it also includes exercises for compressing a long period of time into a single sentence or scene.
Dennis T OConnor's insight:
Barry Lane does a wonderful job with his video lessons. Inspiring!
At its core, the six-word memoir teaches us to be concise but also introspective. Try describing yourself in six words. Not easy, right?
So how does the six-word memoir make sense in a history class? As a history teacher, I am always looking to integrate my class with as many different disciplines as possible. I also try to turn my students away from being just consumers of information and toward being global creators of everything cool. When I learned that the National Writing Project teamed up with Mozilla to create a Thimble webmaking application for six-word memoirs, I began to realize the potential this could have in my history classes.
Word Mover allows children and teens to create “found poetry” by choosing from word banks and existing famous works; additionally, users can add new words to create a piece of poetry by moving/manipulating the text.
Corbet Harrison: This last school year, I decided I wanted to try something different with vocabulary. I used to give them lists to memorize, but Common Core wants me to push them past rote memorization, which I understand, and--quite frankly--I support. This entire last school year had me toying with new ways to teach vocabulary skills with other things I found myself losing the time to teach well. I consolidated my vocabulary expectations with poetry, etymology, and grammar lessons, and I ended up discovering a great new way to expand my students vocabularies while they were practicing other skills of language arts, skills that appealed to both my recklessly creative and my linearly logical kids.
Overview: Students (and teachers) will begin by sharing things they collect. The class will then brainstorm as many different things people collect that they can think of. The brainstorm will continue as students brainstorm all of the different ways people can display their collections. After sharing from The Boy Who Loved Words, the teacher will challenge the class with this metaphor/simile: "Suppose people could collect words in the same way that they collect butterflies. Suppose they displayed the collected words in the same way that collected butterflies are displayed. What would that display case look like?" After drawing a "cover page" to introduce a special vocabulary section of their writer's (or interactive) notebooks, students will learn a format for collecting favorite words they come across during the upcoming school year.
Wordament® is a unique and highly addictive word game: a two-minute long word tournament where you compete in real-time, on the same board, against everyone else currently playing.
You are playing the exact same game with hundreds around the world at the same time. Every time a new game starts – that game is being presented to everyone. After every game your stats show up and shortly after you are compared to every player in the world that played along side of you.
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