My Del.icio.us Site

Wordle.net is an very new (less than four months old) and interesting site, that creates these colourful ‘Word Clouds’ from text pasted into the site. 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.

At first glance, not unlike the creator Jonathan Feinberg, I thought wordle.net was merely an entertaining way to display what ever you had on your mind. However, upon closer investigation, the potential for enhancing learning quickly became apparent. According to his FAQ section, Jonathan has received other 100 requests from teachers since Wordles conception.

Let’s have a look at an example of powerful words:

Some enterprising person has inserted Eleanor Roosevelt’s speech on human rights into Wordle.net. You can clearly see the 150 most used words (small connective words are automatically removed). As you can see in Eleanor’s speech, the themes of Freedom, Human Rights and People have a strong presence. Lets compare Eleanor’s speech, with George Bush’s speech on Sept 11, 2001.

Hmmmmm . . . Anyway, give a Wordle a go, it is a great way to analyse documents quickly and painlessly. Just look at this next Wordle, it could save us all some time.

“Just remember all…that words are powerful, so very powerful, that it can change attitudes (for the better or for the worse), with or without provocation. They can be triggers, reminders, movers, and emotive…Be kind with your words and listen too” ANON

In Our Hands

“To be encouraged,

modelled, and explored”.

Recently we, as a school, have been exploring the Values found in the new curriculum document. While the document does not officially come into effect until 2010, it would be beneficial for all those involved in Education to carefully unpack the inevitable implications of this document.

Unlike previous curriculum documents, the new document is comparatively light reading. However it has been carefully crafted to emphasizes the need for these values to be “expressed in the everyday actions and interactions within the school”. It is also pleasing to note that the document specifically states that these values are neither “exhaustive nor exclusive” allowing us to tailor them to the needs and values of our own diverse community.

Within my own classroom this term, we have chosen to explore the values of Excellence in-depth. As a school we noticed that the value of excellence easily under-pinned the other seven values, the Key Competencies and conveniently coincided with Beijing ‘08. (Three birds with one stone!)

As a class we explored Excellence in our learning, our-selves, our peers, our community and those awesome

super-stars we all admire. We came up with synonyms, actions and affirmations. Check out Wordle for fantastic display ideas.

The unexpected benefit of this intense (almost a week and a half) exploration was how well the value of excellence fit into our classroom ecology. Students identified excellence in their relationships and interactions with each other.

Another surprise when unpacking excellence was how highly they valued the accomplishments of their peers. When asked to identify individuals who showed excellence, most of the names were of children in their own community who had done something selfless. How perceptive children are!