Catching Up - Tool #5

I am finally catching up with my 11 tools! It was hard for me to choose which sites to visit because they ALL seemed great - I wasn't sure what I thought would be most beneficial for my kids.

The first website I chose to work with was Big Huge Labs. There were many different products that students could create to show their understanding of different subjects - magazine covers, movie posters, and trading cards to name a few. I mention these because in social studies, we make a lot of flip books to record our knowledge about famous americans, government leaders, and community helpers. We just finished talking about "Who's the Boss?" of the city, state, and country so I created a trading card with the thought that this could be a fairly simple way for students to show what they know about the people they learn about. I made sure to include the leader's name, their title, and important information about their job. I found an image of Rick Perry on google images, uploaded the image to Big Huge Labs, and then saved the final project to my computer. It was SO user friendly that I also played around with creating a movie poster and a magazine cover with the same information. I think using these activities would be a great way to really encourage students to only include the most important information about their subject.

The next website I visited was Wordle because I had always heard what a fun resource it was. Once I figured it out, it was fun to play around with the layout of the text and choose different fonts. However, once I created by word cloud, the only way to save it was to share it with the entire internet world. That s not something I really wanted to do and definitely not something I would want my 2nd graders doing.

I still wanted to try creating a word cloud because I had a specific idea I wanted to try. I chose to visit ABCYa and I LOVED it! This is a word cloud generator specifically for kids which meant it was REALLY easy to type it the words I wanted to use and the colors were great - these two things are very important to 2nd graders... and their teacher! :)

I wanted to create a sample word cloud that my students could create at the beginning of the year to spark their creativity in Writer's Workshop! My students this year brought it pictures and cut outs from magazines to decorate their Writer's Notebook... but how fun would it be to let them type in some of their favorite people, places, and things to create a word cloud that could be printed and stored on their notebook? I think they would love it. Especially if I decided to be a super nice teacher and print their word clouds in the colors of their choice! Here is the word cloud I created:

The first word I typed in was the name of my fiancé - I like that the program made this the biggest word!

Both of these websites could be used in SO MANY different ways in my classroom! My brain is already buzzing about how to incorporate these resources into my classroom!