Robin Talkowski’s Blog

As usual, time seemed to run out as the end of the year approached.  Last year I created a Voice Thread describing all the major things we studied in 7th grade reading.  Students then commented on what they liked and disliked.  This was then shared with parents, but this year there was no time to get all this done.  So I asked each student to write down everything they remembered learning or working on and developed it into a word cloud using wordle.net.  This allowed me to determine what students remembered or found memorable. 

Students’ Perspective Wordle 

I also developed a wordle stating what I wanted students to remember.  It was interesting to compare and contrast the two wordles.

Teacher Perspective 7th Grade Reading

I was somewhat disappointed that the students did not list more of the reading strategies that formed the bulk of instruction.  And yet, they certainly remembered the contexts in which these strategies were embedded.  They remembered watching the movie Akeelah and the Bee as the culmination of our study of Greek and Latin root words.  They remembered learning camera “shots” and The Door Scene when we were working on the power of visualization.  The wordles also helped me see room for improvement.  I want students to remember the strategies we learn.  The activities should just be the “touch stone” or memory point for retrieving the strategy and how to use it.  Using the word clouds proved to be a quick and easy to summarize and assess a year’s worth of work.  Next year I will try to do better.

In manufacturing, the “just in time” philosophy means that the materials needed for the production process arrive exactly when they are needed.  The same philosophy applies to presenting ideas to teachers for how technology and web 2.0 resources can be used.  I often post a url to a site I have found helpful to me.  When I hear back from teachers it is often to mention how they were just thinking about a new way to do something when they received my e-mail.  This happened most recently with the newspaper generator (http://www.fodey.com/generators/newspaper/snippet.asp).  I shared an “article” I had my students generate, and I received a reply e-mail from a teacher saying how perfect it was for helping her students connect the answer to who, what, where, when, and why questions in a coherent article.  The students loved the idea of their own newspaper article that looked like the real thing.

The fact that this idea arrived in her e-mail mailbox just in time for her classroom focus made all the difference.