What's A Wordle???

Technology is a love of mine and in my house I'm affectionately called a "geek"!!  I am by no means proficient in all the latest technology but I do love to learn about technology.  So the other day I was reading a teacher's blog and she talked about "wordles"...what in the world is a wordle???  So I followed the link and found out a wordle "is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends."  Of course, I had to try it out!!!  Check out my Wordle at the top of my post; it's a Wordle of my Blog!!!  Anyway, go to http://www.wordle.net/  where you can try it out and see for yourself!

Now my teacher friends...you know me...I began to think about how it could be used with students.  You could create posters of student reactions to a piece of literature, create a word poster of synonyms, antonyms, etc., create a poster about character traits.  You get the idea.  I found a link with lots of ideas on how to use wordles in the classroom:  http://www.slideshare.net/JenniferW/wordle-ideas !!  Maybe this will inspire you to think of lots more ways you can use Wordle!

Also while reading, I discovered an opportunity for those "techie teachers" who want to learn all about the newest ideas in technology.  Did you know teachers can become  "Google Certified Teachers"?  Yep, they can!!  Google has a "Google Teacher Academy" and all you have to do is submit a creative entry and you could be selected to attend a Google training session.  Isn't that just way cool!!  Interested? 

Go to http://www.google.com/educators/gta.html and check it out!!!  Trainings are held in different locations at different times during the year.  Maybe I'll get to hear about one of you being selected!! 

Oh... by the way, there's a contest on Google for Educators too!  It's called "Doodle4Google" and students can design a new Google.com homepage, submit it and possibly win a scholarship!! 

Check it out at: http://www.google.com/doodle4google/.    

Happy Teching to All,