New Beginnings

To me the phrase "New Beginnings" has always seemed a bit redundant. For aren't all beginnings brand new? Yet, we find ourselves at the beginning of another school year, hopefully emboldened by an ever too brief summer break. The question then remains, how do we make this beginning a new experience for ourselves and for our students?

The purpose of this blog is to bring those new and authentic experiences to you, the forever overworked, unpaid, and under-appreciated backbone of education that we call "teacher". I will focus much of my discussion on tools that you can use in your classroom to address CCSS, but I will occasionally delve into the new pedagogy that surrounds online learning. (But, I will put this in another section so that you will not have to worry with the psychology behind learning...unless you want to.)


So...let's start off with something easy.

Word Clouds

For the beginning of the year, have your students create word clouds that describe themselves. Ask your students questions about their demographics, interests, aspirations, etc as you normally would, but have them create a word cloud instead of writing answers on a piece of paper. 

If you do not have technology: 

Ask students to draw a shape that represents some part of their personality. Then, ask them to fill in the shape with adjectives that describes them most concretely. Pass out markers, colored pencils, highlighters, whatever you have on hand, and watch what they come up with. Depending on grade level, you may wish to provide a list of common adjectives and challenge your students to utilize stronger adjectives - instead of "popular" maybe a word like "gregarious". As students finish their word clouds, have them present them to the rest of the class or small groups and post them around the room. 

If you have technology: 

Follow the same process but utilize a word cloud program like wordle.net or tagxedo.com. Students can use the programs to choose the shapes, colors, and designs of their word cloud. Then, have the students include their word cloud in their own blog or website or have them post it to you class website or blog. Again, students should introduce themselves within the online platform through comments, chat features, videos, audio podcasts, or by something as simple as email. 

Teachers can utilize word clouds as an introduction to new information, activating prior knowledge, vocabulary review, or as a review for assessments.