One Teacher's Adventures

Today was the last day of classes in my district.  While I am very ready for the summer break, I will definitely miss my group of Grade 4s.   As a year-end gift, I decided to create a Wordle for my partner teacher with all of our students' names.  Wordles are word clouds that you can make for free ( click here ).  You simply type text into the wordle box, and the program generates a word cloud that you can edit for font, colour, and configuration.  The program uses an algorithm that increases the size of words that are repeated more often. My Wordle looked like this: I loved this so much that I decided to something similar, but more special, for the kids.  First, I gave every student a page with all their classmates names on it.  I asked them to write down three words to describe everyone else in the class.  (We brainstormed a list of about 50 or 60 positive adjectives before they began and I wrote them all on the chalkboard). Then I took the sheets in and typed the result

This week, my Grade 4 class was learning about Internet Safety.  We talked about common lures predators will use online, why it is important to never give your passwords to friends, not to believe what people say online, and that it is very important to think about what is being posted.  We talked about the fact that once a photo is posted online, anyone can copy it and do with it what they will.  I wanted to show my class how fast and how far photos can spread on social media sites like Facebook.  To illustrate the point, I wrote a message on our whiteboard.  It looked like this: I took a photo of the message and posted it on my Facebook page on June 2 at 3:30pm PST.  I was shocked with the results!  By 7:00am the next day, it had already reached over 6700 people.  The class began to map where the comments and likes were coming from (and I was able to sneak in a geography lesson!).  We created this map after the first day: As more and more people commented, the map was l