Meet the Students of 2009-2010

We headed down to the computer lab for the first time this year on Friday. As soon as we walked in I immediately knew I had my work cut out for me...WOW! No...No...No...it isn't what you think. It wasn't the kids, or even me. It was the fact that I had no teacher computer with LCD projector from which to teach. It was going to be a tough lesson. I had the kids make a list of words they wanted to use to describe themselves in a wordle. So...step 1, type the list in Microsoft Word and save it to his or her student folder on the server. Since some students didn't even know they had a folder on the server, this was a task in itself. BUT...we got step one accomplished. I had to have the kids use Word to type the list instead of just going straight to worlde for a couple of reasons. 1, if they accidentally close out wordle, they would have to retype which can be a nightmare for beginning keyboarders. 2, they need to learn to create a file and save it in an appropriate place. 3, it is a great opportunity to learn to toggle between two open windows as well as learn to copy and paste. So...off to step 2. The kids had to open the internet, navigate to the class wiki and click on the link to create a wordle. Easy enough! The third step was to cut the text from the open word document and paste it in the wordle box. So far so good! The final step was a rough one. Since I wanted the kids to save these wordles as images I had them take a screen capture, paste it into powerpoint, crop it and finally save it as a jpeg. Whew...all without a display to demonstrate!!! While it was quite exhausting for me...they did a great job! Here are the wordles to prove it.