Wordle and Poll Everywhere

In the Instructional Technology class I am taking at Fairmont State University we used two tools to learn cool new ways to view answers to questions.  The two tools are Wordle and Poll everywhere.  The question we used was what ten words would we use to describe the of type teacher we would like to be.  What is Wordle you ask? Wordle is a fun tool that makes any word seem more fun.  It is used to take several words together and the more a word is used the bigger it appears.  Poll everywhere is a poll that people can use to get several people at once to respond to a question.  It is an interesting tool to use them together and use the words that several people posted to the answer of a question and make a wordle from those words to make the answers much more fun.

An anonymous teacher said, “I have just started using wordle in the classroom for literature analysis. Student groups will be creating a wordle to portray the significance of each chapter of The Great Gatsby. Each student must create their own wordle. Students will come together as groups and compare the wordles they created. For example, all the chapter 2 students will compare their wordles and draw conclusions about chapter 2 to present to the class.”  She posted her thoughts on February 28^th, 2009.  I found her idea fascinating and would love to have the opportunity to use her ideas in my own classroom.

In my classroom I would use these tools to help make certain subject matters more fun.  Spelling would be a good subject to use on wordle.  The student could write the words for the week in a wordle and they would need to know the spelling and the meaning of the word.  In using wordle and poll everywhere collaboratively it would help me to teach the students to be creative in conceptual understanding and thinking.   It would also be creative to have children take a poll where the question would be, “Give me 3 words you do not know the meaning to.” Then you take the words that they give in the poll everywhere and create a wordle from those words.  Then the words that appear the biggest are the words that several children would want to learn and teach the children the words from larges to smallest.  This can be a fun creative way to teach children new words.