For this week’s DS106 Assignment Bank I chose a visual assignment I could see myself using in the classroom. The visual assignment Word Cloud called for the creator to use Wordle.net or a similar site to create a word cloud. I could see myself using this site in a number of ways in my classroom. For one, I could ask students to create a word cloud about a particular chapter they just read in a book. This could be used to see what they are taking away from each chapter they read-in the end they could even have a word cloud for each chapter of a book. The other way I saw a word cloud being used in the classroom is as a sort of anchor chart, which is what I modeled below.
Here I chose words that I imagine my students and I would come up with while discussing expectations for accountable book talks in our classroom. These are words I would associate with discussion techniques students would use.
In order to create the word cloud I first went to Wordle.net.
Once on Wordle it was easy. I just clicked the link to create my own, and then listed words that I thought applied. Next I played around with the font, and color. There is the option to use one of their templates, but they were all really dark, and I wanted all of the text to be horizontal so students could easily ready the words.
Overall, I really enjoyed this assignment partly because it gave me different ideas for lessons and a new form of expression for my students.
erinmariegblog 
Nice thoughts on using the word cloud in the classroom. I like the idea of them being a quick view of what students are taking away from the reading. I was also thinking you could combine student word clouds, which could show the class where they are picking up the same ideas and where they might differ. Could be a great start to text discussions. Thanks for sharing!
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