I made word clouds from the student responses on the end of the year survey I just gave. I am going to share them with my students tomorrow.
I love and have always used Wordle, but I cannot get Java working on any computer I use. I am sure I could if I had time, but I’m a teacher and it is MAY for goodness sakes.
Instead I discovered Word Cloud. I loved using the WordCloud website because you don’t need Java to use it! And you can use different shapes and even upload an image.
One Word To Describe This Class:
One Word To Describe This Class
KEEP!
Advice to Next Year’s Students
START
CHANGE
Most Difficult Topic To Learn
Favorite Topic of the Year
I Speak Math 
I should so use this as reflections after PD I give. And I have no idea what Delta Math is, but I’m about to look it up and find out!
LOVE this, will be doing this too. Keep these great ideas coming!
what is one-sheets?
Date: Thu, 19 May 2016 03:20:53 +0000 To: djreilly1041@msn.com
Hi Stephanie, I need to blog all about it – and will very soon! But here is a start. 🙂
https://ispeakmath.org/2015/10/16/functions-unit-brain-dump-for-one-sheet-test-study-guides/
Oh right — I remember reading that. Yes, that sounds like a good skill to develop. Thanks.
Hi Julie,
I am new here and really like your blog. Your teacher survey and it’s results especially catched me. Great idea!
But I just wondered why you wrote some words bigger than other ones – are they rated after frequency (how often this word was listed by the students)?
Sofi
Yes! The larger the word, the more often it was said.
Thanks for your reply!
It’s very interesting!
I’ve got some more questions:
How do you use your last two clouds for the next schoolyear?
I already noticed there are almost no difficult topics mentioned as favorite topics by your students. Maybe it is reasoned through assuming that the learning activity and the learning interest/motivation correlate with each other? Upon acceptance that activity and interest correlate, a possible conclusion may be that the difficulty might increase when students are more motivated in working on a topic, or?
Sofi
There were several topics listed in both the most difficult to learn and favorite, trig, Conics, unit circles… Which does indicate that some topics that are easy for some students are still tough for others. What did interest me was that the data chapter was the favorite of so many students. I feel that is because we used their data, so it was interesting to them. Since they were interested, they were more engaged and difficult material was easier to master. What I would love to do is find similar ways to get kids to enjoy the rest of these topics, especially the ones the majority of students felt were the most difficult. Some topics are tougher than others, especially ones that are brand new to the students this year. I would love any ideas that you may have! 🙂
Its nice to see how interest and success works together in practice. I havent finished my studies yet but I’m teaching which means my experience is minimal . In my opinion it is especially hard to catch the students interest in the subject math…! Particularly students that have a bad mindset towards the subject because of continuous bad grades for example ..Anyways, do you think you could also catch their interest with this method?”
I like your conversation about activating the students participation by their interest. Since the kids nowadays are very into multimedia it could be helpful to combine multimedia with learning. Have you tried flipped teaching before?
Thanks, Julie! I really liked the Keep-Change-Stop-Start and the word clouds. I even tried it out myself. Thanks again.