Word Clouds, So Many Uses

Wordle is a great tool that all teachers can use in their classrooms and use with students.  Wordle is a tool for generating word clouds.  The greatest thing about this Web 2.0 tool is that you don’t need to log in to anything.  You simply go to the website, click Create and start creating your word cloud.  When you are done you can take a screen shot (command+shift+4) of the image and save it to your computer, then print it or add to your website or blog.

Ideas for Classroom use:

• brainstorm starter to a new unit/KWL
• reflections
• poetry
• spelling words
• synonyms
• characters in a book

This is a fabulous  slideshare presentation with many ideas for integrating Wordle into your teaching.

Good luck and be sure to share your wordles with me!

Conference in FirstClass

Runkle School Conference in FirstClass

FirstClass is the email client we use in Brookline.  When you log into FirstClass, you see your FirstClass desktop.  This has many icons on it.  One icon that you should see is the Runkle School conference icon.  A  FirstClass conference allows users to exchange messages, documents in a common location.  This conference often has school announcements from the central office, superintendent, principal, other teachers, and much more.  In the conference there are folders located at the top.  These folders contain documents that might be helpful to you at one time or another.  Two folders that I remind people about each year is the Technology & Library folder.  and the Forms and Such folder.  Check them out!

Printer People

Setting Preview as your default .pdf viewer

Many emails we receive have .pdfs as attachments.  On the Mac platform, we have a convenient tool called Preview that is built to view .pdfs and .jpgs pretty nicely.

To make Preview your default .pdf viewer, control + click (which is equivalent to right-click) on any .pdf, and choose Get Info.  Or, click once on the .pdf and hit command + i (Get Info).

In the section Open with: Change the default viewer from Adobe Reader to Preview by selectingPreview from the drop-down list.  If it’s not in the list, click Choose Other… which will bring you to your Applications folder.  Then choose Preview.
To use Preview as the default, click Change All… at the bottom of this window.

Poetry Anthology

My latest idea for a student project involves a 4th grade unit on Poetry. Each year the teacher and I guide students in a technology integrated poetry anothology. I'm thinking of changing the anthology focus a little to involve this blog, digital pictures and a wiki. I was also thinking of having students create a poetry anthology website. I'm not sure just yet how this will play out in the classroom, but I am meeting with the teacher today, so hopefully she'll love the idea as much as I do!

Welcome!

I hope to use this as a place to share various things… student work, teacher work, my own technological and/or educational wonderings, and things that inspire me.

A little bit about me… I am an Educational Technology Specialist at the John D. Runkle School in Brookline, Massachusetts.   One of my yearly goals has been to make more of my students’ work public, so I began doing so on the Runkle Technology wiki.  My thinking for using a wiki to share student work is so my teachers can also post any student work on the same wiki, eventually.  It’s all a work in progress, but I have posted some work from this year.  I hope to do the same on this blog.