And that means the first presidential debate is tonight at 9pm ET. We’ll be watching at barackobama.com/debate, featuring a livestream, a live blog, and a few other live things, probably. See you there.
This week my students had to complete a project using Tagxedo and I wanted to share the results.
As most of you know, I teach Bible and right now we’re finishing up the Minor Prophets. The students had to pick one of the prophets, then read that whole book (The longest is only 14 chapters, most are around 3). I had uploaded the plain text of each book to RenWeb [thanks to my handy Logos software], which they had to download as a .txt file.
They then uploaded them to Tagxedo. When there, they had to look at the biggest words (which are biggest because of frequency) then choose which words to “skip” and not include in their word cloud. Their goal was to leave the biggest words that they felt represented the theme of that minor prophet.
Once they had the key themes as the biggest words, they had to select shapes and colors that they thought represented the tone of the prophet’s message. Was it hopeful? Angry? Dramatic?
Save and send to me and they were done. They really loved using the website, once they figured it out technologically.
If you’re an English teacher I highly recommend using something like this. :)
At our school in the early years we do an activity called Playboxes. Many of our students have speech and language problems and Playboxes is one of the ways we encourage students to develop and extend these skills. We have 2 sessions a week, and we pick a number of themed playboxes then in small groups of 6 students, do role-play activities and facilitate conversations and story telling between the students.
This is the kids playing with the Fairytale Playbox, and here they are attending a fairytale wedding.
About a month ago, I taught short and long vowels to my kindergartners. Since many of my students respond well to kinesthetic activities, I found a suggestion online to have the kids “act out” the vowel sounds. I can’t find the source now, but know I got this idea from some online forum. The forum…
