Digital Word Cloud "Predict the Story"

I am currently taking a district-level, learning management system professional development, and one of our assignments dealt with creating a digital lesson demonstrating concept attainment/application/prediction (yes, very Educationese terms) which would use with our students. Rather than invent and learn a new web app tool, I decided to revise/adapt an already existing strategy to a digital setting: Word Clouds.

I am introducing a new reading with students, so I created a word cloud for students involving words which would be in this passage (see here for how to create a word cloud using MS Word). Based on the word cloud, students are to predict what they think will happen in the story which they will be reading soon. 

In creating the word cloud, I found using Dark City color format was easier for students to distinguish the words. I also set the layout to Horizontal. 

Directions

1. On a Google Form, insert your word cloud as an image/picture.
2. The directions are simple: ONLY using the words from the word cloud, write your FOUR sentences in ENGLISH below. Be sure to number your sentences. 

Why respond in English and not in the target language? Because this is a prediction activity using vocabulary, I need for them to respond in English to demonstrate comprehension of those words. If I asked them to respond purely in the target language, I would get students who would put the Latin words together to form a sentence, but if the sentence were not to make any sense, I would not know why: did they just throw Latin words together just to complete the assignment? Did they not understand the meaning of a particular word which then impedes my comprehension of what they wrote? What if students just created a sentence which was all nouns or all verbs? By having them respond in English, I can at least tell that students are demonstrating comprehension of the given vocabulary words.

Observations

1. This was a very easy digital assignment for students to complete, but it still involved some degree of higher-level thinking, as it was dealing with prediction based on given information.
2. This was a very easy digital assignment for me to create. Probably creating the word cloud took the most time.
3. I enjoyed reading student responses. Many students tried to predict the entire story, but most just wrote four random sentences (which is perfectly okay!).
4. Students told me that they liked the assignment, because it was short!

Word Cloud Cloze Sentence Activity

This is an activity which I learned from Cindy Hitz, and it is a great higher-order thinking, post-reading activity involving word clouds. In the past, I have normally used word clouds as a vocabulary highlighter game or have students predict what they think is going to happen in the story. Cindy takes it to the next level and uses the word clouds as part of a cloze sentence activity. So instead of calling out individual vocabulary words where students race to highlight words, now you read out cloze sentences from a reading, and students race to highlight the missing word in the word cloud.

You can find directions for this activity here on Cindy's blog at the bottom under the heading "Game Smashing with Word Clouds." 

Here are my directions on how to create word clouds using MS Word 

Example - this is based on the Monster and Dumpling Movie Talk:

Word Cloud

Slide presentation with cloze sentences



Observations

1. This is a great post-reading activity, but students need to be very familiar with the reading before they do this since they are doing cloze sentences without a word bank per se.
2. I loved the double input which students received in this activity - visually seeing the sentences and me reading them aloud.
3. Keep the sentences somewhat short, because the activity involves a lot of processing, so to give students a long sentence for they which they have to understand the meaning, to realize what the missing word is, and then to find it in a scrambled word cloud is a lot. 
4. I thought that students would struggle with knowing what the missing word was, when in actuality, students told me that was the easy part (again, because we had gone over the story so many times in different ways). The difficult part for them was finding the word in the word cloud before their opponents!
5. I love the higher-order thinking going on in this activity. It goes way beyond the basics of the regular vocabulary highlighter game. 
6. To keep the faster processors from always finding the word first, sometimes I would tell students that they had to wait until I said, "Go!" This allowed the slower processors a chance. 
7. Although I only focused on one reading, I threw in distractor words from other passages to fill out the word cloud. 

Wordle Word Cloud

This is a pre-reading activity which I learned from a language arts teacher at my school and then saw Carol Gaab demonstrate at NTPRS last summer.  For this, you will need the Wordle website and a reading which you plan to introduce .

If you are not familiar with Wordle, it is a website which will take a reading passage and then based on word frequency,  it will create a word cloud, showing which words are used more often than others - the bigger the size of the word, the more frequently the word is used. 

This particular activity is something which you will want to do just prior to reading a story for the first time, because students will be predicting what they think the story will be about based on the words which they see. As a result, you as the teacher will have needed to preview any new vocabulary/language structures through other prereading activities.

Instructions

1. Cut/paste a 5-6 sentences from the reading onto the Wordle website.
2. Create a word cloud using Wordle.
3. Save the image and paste onto a document
4. Project the word cloud onto the board and based on the words in the word cloud, ask students to predict what they think the story is going to be about. I ask students to create sentences in Latin. This is why students need to know already the vocabulary/language structures in the story.

An example:

Observations

1. Students really do like to predict what they think they the story will be about.
2. Because students have predicted the plot of the story, they have a more vested interest in what they are reading, as they are mentally comparing their version with the actual story
3. After reading the story, I have actually had students say, "I like my version so much better than the real one." Many times, I will make a mental note of what they thought the plot to be and will write an alternate version of the story which incorporates their plot for them to read later.