Speak

I’ve been using Wordle to begin conversations around standards this year, and I have to admit, it’s kinda neat to pull these posters out and watch teachers get excited about the New York State Core Curriculum. It’s amazing what can happen when you switch up the visual, isn’t it? The Wordle above represents the speaking standards and performance indicators for grade eleven, and today, I got to spend a bit of time talking possibilities with a group of high school English teachers.

Frequency determines the size of words, and understanding this invites some great conversation around what our standards and performance indicators ask of teachers…..and more importantly, of students.

What would happen if we asked students to bring artifacts to class that represented the real work of their real lives? You know—the stuff they care about. Like the stories they write on their own time, the videos they make, their journal entries, and their song lyrics. What if we invited them to demonstrate how they are learning when we’re not around, and then what if we used visuals like the one above to begin speaking with them about what it means to attend to standards? What if we projected Wordles like these on the walls of our classrooms and allowed kids to color  in their own alignment? What if conversations about standards were colorful celebrations of all that is AWESOME about our kids? Might be fun.

I know that a few people have blogged the whole concept of projecting Wordles and asking kids to color in the terms. I also know that the first post  I saw about this contained a great photo of that very process. If this was YOU, would you leave me a link? I’d like to send readers your way, so that they might see what I mean…..especially since it was your idea that inspired mine.

In the meantime, have a peek at what these creative folks are up to with Wordle:

Rodd Lucier shares The Top Twenty Uses of Wordle

Mike Fisher blogs the Wonders of Wordle

Angela Maiers teaches readers how to Add Images to Wordle…images that could include, I’m thinking, photos of those artifacts I mentioned above. Hmmmm…..