Monday 25 August 2008

Wordle and REM

The holidays are truly over . I've had 4 weeks off this summer . In my college we have to book our holiday and spread the 37 days wisely through the year...So now its back to work on Tuesday and time to get on with some serious preparation for the start of the new academic year. I'll start with a resolution that I will have a life outside college and to show I mean business the whole family are off to see REM on Wednesday. I have the possible set list with orders from the children to have a good listen first! In preparation for this I've created a Wordle video using Movie maker. Have a watch !

I shall be using Wordle as one of my induction activities - everyone will add their name and we will display it on the whiteboard see an example below:

Have a good year, pace yourself, enjoy the company of your colleagues and most of all have fun with the students.

5 comments:

Danny Maas said...

What a fantastic way to use Wordle! Was this a group project (i.e. multiple students creating a single video)? Was it difficult getting the words to appear in the order you wanted them to? I found this blog post trough Tom Barrett's "Forty-three Interesting Ways to use Wordle in the Classroom"! Congrats again!
Danny @dannymaas

PLNaugle said...

Judy,
This is the most inspiring use of Wordle I've seen. Like Danny, I found this post by way of the link you included on Tom Barrett's site, and am curious about the amount of time it took to complete this project. When you said you used Movie maker did you mean Windows Movie Maker?

Bravo and thanks for sharing it with us.

Vienna said...

Thanks for your comments.It wasn't a class project but a personal one that I did when I was exploring the use of wordle in the classroom. I teach students with learning difficulties and we have used wordle in much simpler ways I don't see any reason why it couldn't work as a classroom project.
It was a weekend project...
I copied the lyrics in chunks into Wordle and used 'randomise' to choose the design I wanted . If the words don't come out in the order you want just randomise again until you are happy. This would work well with students as they get the chance to experiment with designs and its really easy.
Once I was happy with the design . I used print screen and copied the image into the Paint programme then saved each image as a JPEG.This took me a couple of hours but if all the class were working on the images it wouldn't take long.
The images and the music were then imported into Windows Movie Maker . Putting the music in the right spot took time.I had to listen to the track on moviemaker and then stop the track at the right place and slot in the image on the story board. I really enjoyed making it I'm not artistic and it gave me the opportunity to create something that looked good and I got to listen to REM all afternoon

Danny said...

Great idea, i love the way wordle comes out in a movie maker project.
This little app may save you time if you are using a PC http://download.cnet.com/ScreenHunter-Free/3000-2192_4-10063246.html it is screenshot software and you simply hit the f6 button draw a box around what you want to shoot and it drops a jpeg onto your desktop.

Have fun

Mary Patricia Peres-da-Silva said...

I really enjoyed your use of wordle. I usually upload my student podcasts using Animoto and I am thinking of making wordles of what we have learned for the week as a summarizer and uploading it in Animoto after taking screen shots using Jing