SMART Board Goodies A Resource Blog by Amber Coggin 

I’ve been seeing “word clouds” around for the past couple of months, but wasn’t sure how I could use them until I read this blog post from Kevin Jarrett that referred to this Twitter post by @sammorra. @sammorra used Wordle.net to create holiday cards. I immediately thought about the Winter Wonderland Holiday Card page. I hadn’t planned on doing a card because we were barely able to get our monthly activities done, but I figured this would be the perfect tool to create something quick.

I went to Wordle, clicked on create, and typed in all of the 1st through 3rd grade teachers names. I also typed in my school’s name multiple times so it would show as the main word. I then changed my font, layout and colors by editing the custom color palette. I made a print screen of the image and pasted it into the Paint.net program (LOVE THIS PROGRAM!), added a title and some clip art images that I found here, and BAM- a quick and easy holiday card!

After Christmas break, I’m thinking of letting them fill out a Google Doc form telling me one thing they got for Christmas. I’ll then make a wordle out of the results to see what the most popular gift was!

A technology teacher from my district spent the day with me yesterday. She noticed my Technology ABCs and asked if I could share them with her. Of course I said yes, so I figured I’d share them here, too! Here they are in PDF and Word (in case you want to make changes).

I cut them out and put them above my white board, just like a “regular” teacher would. Hope you find them useful. If you look real hard you can see them in this picture.