Cloudy in the Library

To continue our goal to build a culture of reading at the middle school, I decided to enlist the help of Wordle. I wanted to come up with a way for students to share with their classmates what books they have been reading. Wordle popped into my mind as a way to allow students to create fun "lists" of what they have read - aka "book clouds". Students have been hanging their newly created "book clouds" throughout the library.

TIPS

Creating Lists

Have students create a list in a Word document. This will prevent and solve any problems that arise from students running out of time or having technical difficulties with Wordle.

Create a numerical scale for them to stay within when creating their lists. I had students assign their names as 100. The maximum number they could assign a book title was 60 and the minimum number was 20. This prevented any titles from being too large and competing with their name or from being so small they could not be seen. I recommended that the students use the numbers as a rating system for how they liked the book - the more they liked it, the higher the number.

Encourage them to create a fairly lengthy list. I printed out their circulation logs to help them remember some titles they read. I recommend at least 25 titles.

Example List:
MISS MAKATCHE READS:100
Hunger Games:55
Fablehaven:50
Someone Named Eva:44
Soldier X:23
Sisters of the Sword:38
Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life:26


Using Wordle Advanced

Pasting the list into Wordle Advanced allows you to keep book titles together.

Wordle - Advanced Tools via kwout

Personalizing

Students can continue to hit the RANDOMIZE button until they find a configuration that they like.

The students can tweak the color, font, and layout by using the toolbar at the top of their word cloud.

EXAMPLE


Cloud photo used under Creative Commons license from http://www.flickr.com/photos/35375520@N07/3680331543/.

Annual Report

I always enjoy reading through other librarian's annual reports. It gives me a lot of great ideas for my own library. So, I thought I would add my annual report to the mix. While I would have liked to be able to post the annual report I submitted to my principal and superintendant, it was full of student pictures that I could not share online. So, here is my abbreviated (less pretty) annual report.



To try out something new, I uploaded the report to Yudu to create a an embeddable report. I read about Yudu from Richard Byrne's blog. I have a feeling that Yudu is going to become a new favorite of mine and my students. I forsee this as a great way to include documents on wikis instead of the standard method on wikispaces. Documents can be published as books, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, etc. Yudu also provides you with the ability to upload photos, audio, as well as visually bookmark websites. I'll definitely be exploring Yudu more this summer!