Sometimes the best laid plans… Well, you know how technology is. I had planned for my students to use Tagxedo to create word webs for their One Little Word. The work was going well. They were having fun on Thesaurus.com finding synonyms, but when trying Tagxedo, the app was not working properly. I did some troubleshooting. I updated, but we were running out of time. So I quickly moved them over to Wordle. There is a feature for sharing that I had not used yet in Wordle. If you save to the “Public Gallery,” you get a link that the students could put into their blog posts. If Java was working, the link worked.
Sometimes, Plan B is the answer. I wanted my students to find synonyms feeling like this was good literacy work. Placing them into a word cloud was fluff. Either way, they enjoyed exploring, writing about, and designing their OLW this week.
After all I found Janet Ilko’s Slide Share for doing the One Little Word activity. If you haven’t done this lesson yet, you may be interested in her way of teaching it. There are many ways to add digital literacy into the classroom. As teachers, we have to find the ways that work for us and for our students (within the constraints of district usage and computer updates.)
Link to Emily’s OLW Wordle.









Lovely clouds …
I finally got it written, Margaret-so busy, but wanted to share, & hopefully hear from others about apps to use, and tips for anything blogging. Thanks for doing this!
Forgot to add that my post also speaks of Plan B-what a time we had, so excited, then had to wait! Thanks for talking about the word cloud gallery-I wondered where to get the code. I’ve just taken screen shots before!
I feel like plan b is the usual and often plan c! I’m going back to the classroom tomorrow and using your wisdom and resources to start our OLW work. Many thanks for sharing. Maybe I’ll have something next week to share. For now I’m just benefiting from all of your work!