US History Update

Today was my first chance to get to use the Asus laptops in my classroom. Because most of the games for US History don't come into effect until after World War I, we spent the day working on Wordle.net which is a Web 2.0 app. After the initial oohing and ahhing, the students were immediately ready to get to work. Their assignment was to find three different articles looking at different aspects of the Presidency. They then had to pick what they thought were the two most important paragraphs for each and then insert them in no particular order into wordle. They were excited to see the word clouds, and were surprised at which words were "highlighted" as the most repeated. They then had to decide why they thought those words were repeated in all the articles, and if different articles had different emphasis.

Pros to Wordle:
1. Students were very excited to get to use it, and appreciated the ease of the app.
2. Students were able to do quick analysis on articles and view different perspectives on how words were used, picking up on key vocabulary

Cons:
1. no save option, only print or save online for public view.
2. Students that had an issue printing, tried to email me screen shots but since the screen is small, the screen shot does not capture the entire word cloud.