Robin Talkowski’s Blog: Reading & Technology

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.