Data Visualization

The data visualization resource I explored was Wordle.net. This website creates word clouds. The essential learning I gained from exploring this site is that images and words are not mutually exclusive; they can be combined. You can have an image created from words. This is a concept I can’t wait to share with my students. Kids (and people in general) try to fit things in neat little boxes (one box for words, one box for images), and this will blow that thought process out of the water!

My school is very big this year on 60 second questions. This attempts to incorporate more writing into all content areas. It begins when students are given a prompt. For example, I might tell my kids to list every word that they think goes with the human skeleton. Students need to spend the entire 60 seconds writing. Their pencil cannot stop moving. This is a good activity to activate background knowledge. Then the students share what they have written.

I would use this 60 second question in combination with Wordle.net instead of a KWL at the beginning of a unit. I would collect the students’ responses and input them into Wordle. The words that more students came up with would appear larger. At the beginning of the unit I would expect most students to put words like bone, skull, rib cage. Then after we have spent several months learning about the human skeleton we will do this activity again and see how different our word cloud looks now that we have a greater understanding of the topic. This shows students how much their understanding of the human skeleton has changed from the beginning to the end of the unit and it is really making them aware of their own learning. We can display these word clouds in our classroom to remind us of what we have learned and show how much we have learned.