Head in the (word) clouds - Reviewing my VRT presentation

Yesterday, I gave my presentation on using Wordle in the language classroom as part of the Virtual Round Table conference and, while it’s all fresh in the memory, I thought I’d offer a few reflections and get some feedback.

I love the global nature of these online events and the fact that the audience was located in a fair few different countries (see the word cloud images below). However, while presenting and attending without the need to travel is an advantage, there are potential problems with participating via computer as well. At the Global Education Conference, my son interrupted the presentation and this time, my computer crashed halfway through causing a delay of several minutes while I rebooted, leaving my audience in the lurch somewhat!

Technical difficulties aside, I thought it went quite well (if a little rushed towards the end due to the lost time). I tried to make it more interactive, asking the participants to type responses to some of the activities I demonstrated such as predicting content, matching words together and constructing sentences which worked quite well (it seemed only a few of the audience actively took part in these however). Ideally, I would have liked to get more ideas out of the audience and perhaps I could have cut out a couple of my examples to allow for more contributions like that.

But your feedback will be much more valuable than my own reflections. If you were in attendance, I’d love to know what you thought of the session - both what you liked and what you think could be done to improve it. Please leave your comments!

 

 

The presentation

Here's the link to the archive of the session

I created a digital hand-out with Google docs, which I’ve pasted into the blog post below (click here to see the doc itself) along with a copy of the slides I used.

Using wordle in the language classroom

View more presentations from David Dodgson

My Wordle user page - you can find links to all of the word clouds from today’s presentation (plus a couple more) here.

 

Surveys

• A link to the Google doc used for a quick survey during the presentation...
  
• ...and links to the word clouds created from the attendees answers:

Where are you attending from?

What type of learners do you teach?

Favourite food (the one that created most interest ;))

• For an example of how I’ve done this in my own classes, here’s a post from my blog entitled Speaking Class Activity - ‘Our favourite things’ survey

Examples for previewing/predicting texts

• “The Magnificent Century”: Word Cloud | Original article from the Guardian
  
• “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”: Word Cloud | Story as written on ivyjoy.com/fables/

Dictogloss

• Our first time with dictogloss - a post from my blog describing how I used a word cloud to support my learners in the reconstruction phase of a dictogloss activity.
  
• Doing dictogloss with E1s (elementary) - another example of using word clouds during dictogloss, this time from Anna Rose’s excellent Magpie Moments blog. Check out the rest of her posts as well! :)

Articles, blog posts and other useful links

• 50 Interesting Ways to Use Wordle in the Classroom - crowd-sourced Google presentation created by Tom Barrett
  
• 19 Word Cloud Resources, Tips & Tools - blog post by Shelly Terrell covering various word cloud generators and how to use them.
  
• Tech Tools & Pedagogy II - Word Clouds - blog post by Marisa Constantinides comparing the features of different word cloud websites.
  
• 2 Minute EdTech Talk: 6 Ways to Use Wordle in the Classroom - interview by Simple K12 with Dave Dodgson (me!) describing six different uses for Wordle in class.
  
• Blended Learning: Using Technology Beyond the Classroom (Part 7) - pdf article by Pete Sharma and Barney Barrett with different ideas for using Wordle including scrambled sentences and vocabulary collocations as well as accompanying examples.
  
• Using Wordle as a Supplementary Research Tool - for the more academically minded, a recent article by Carmel McNaught and Paul Lam looking at how Wordle can be used by researchers to analyse texts and survey data.
  
• Word Clouds for Chunks - an article by Hanna Kryszewska describing a lesson she did using ‘chunks’ in the word cloud with the ~ symbol.
  
• And finally, the amazing Cybrayman’s Word Cloud page - you can find links to all sorts of things about word clouds here!