Ending the Year with Wordle

I always give the students in my class an end of year reflection. I figure its a time for them to sound off about things they have like and disliked. It also an opportunity for me to get their opinions about things that have happened over the year.

The reflection I gave them this year included these six questions:

1.) What did you like about being in this classroom this year?
2.) What did you not like?
3.) What assignment or project have we done this year that you think I should keep? Why?
4.) What assignment or project have we done that you think I should not keep?
5.) What would you like to see changed in schedules, seating, classroom design, etc.?
6.) What advice would you give to students who are coming in here next year?

11 students chose to type their responses to these questions. (which just happens to be all of the computers I have in my classroom). Seeing as you we have a cool new tool in Wordle, I copied all of their responses into it and generated this cloud:

I'm happy with this cloud for a few reasons:

1.) Being a junior high teacher, who deals with 13 and 14 year old attitudes all year long, I'm happy not to see this reflection filled with words like "boring" and "sucks." Sometimes the absence of things is a sign of success on its own.

2.) I am happy to see words like "interesting," "projects," "think," "fun," and "learn" on here. These are some of the key words in my classroom. We spend huge amounts of time on long term projects, allowing kids to build up there concepts and understandings of things. I'm glad to see some of that come through in this cloud.

3.) Some of the smaller words have interesting stories behind them. Although they have been mentioned fewer times by students, things like "playing," "video," and "games" paints a clear picture for me. I'm also pleased to see words like "design" and "couch" on here as I've tried to do something different with the square concrete box that a classroom can be.

More tools to give us at least a peek at new insights in our classroom. This would be interesting to have students do at the end of a unit of study to see which words they  are using the most. What has caught their attention?

Tags: wordle, classroom, reflection

Comments

[John Martin]

Wordle is a pretty interesting visualization tool. My wife, who teaches 7th grade bio-science, saw Wordle up on my laptop last night and said, "What's that?" After I explained word clouds and how Wordle works, she said "You know that would be a really useful tool for my students to see how often they're using certain words." Visual feedback can be very powerful for many learners. I know I was surprised by what I saw when I dropped my CV into it.

Enjoy the year as it winds down and keep on blogging!

John

[Pat]

This was a great idea and I may use it in my university courses that I teach.

[Jonathan Feinberg]

I seem really to have struck a chord in teachers everywhere. I can't tell you how happy I am to see this. It's wildly beyond my expectations.

[Clarence Fisher]

Jonathon; Wordle is a great tool for education where we often live and die by our words. Education is also a business where we are sorely lacking in graphic tools to help us see patterns in things that kids are doing and writing. I've been calling for a visualization tool all year that tracks kids online and produces a graphic representation of it so we can see where they are spending their time.

Many, many thanks for this great new idea.

[kellie80]

Great idea for a great tool! Thinking it might also be used for works of lit. -- like pasting in poems or Hamlet's soliloquies.

I thought using Wordle for delicious was also really cool. I might make mine into a poster for my room. . .

[Steven Kimmi]

I am glad that my conscience brought me here. I never thought of wordle being a tool for students to use. What better way to show them how many times they use "and," "then," etc. This will take a lot less time than drawing triangles, circles, and rectangles.