SummercoreLearning2008

The Wednesday Wars by Gary Schmidt (review)

Edwards Eyes by Patricia MacLachlan (review)

Leepike Ridge by N.D. Wilson (review)

The Underneath by Kathi Appelt (review)

I just spent the past few days leveling my 5th grade classroom library. And, thanks to Charlie, my 14 year old “digital native” son who refused to use the Fountas and Pinnell Leveled Books for Readers text, I discovered a number of virtual leveled-books databases that make book leveling much less painful.

Scholastic Book Wizard (this is the database Charlie and I used)

A to Z Teacher Stuff

Nancy Giansante leveled book list(teacher list)

Beaverton School District Database

Wordle is a free web site for easily creating beautiful word clouds from text, URLs, RSS feeds or del.icio.us account. They are a great way of visualizing the importance of a particular word in text since the more frequently a word is used the larger it appears in the Wordle.

I uploaded an image from Wordle.  Here’s what I learned to do from the Edublogger:

Once you have created your Wordle you can save it to their Gallery and Wordle provides you the HTML code for embedding it into your blog post. Unfortunately this embeds a thumbnail image (170 pixels by 132 pixels) which is too small to clearly see the words. Dragging this thumbnail to increase size results in an image with blurred text.

One option: on a Mac captures images and save to desktop:

Command+Shift+3 – screencapture of your entire screen.

Command+Shift+4 – Drag the cursor out over the area you want to capture.

Now all you need to do is upload your screenshot and insert the “Full Size” (NOT “medium”) image into your blog post! The “Full Size” image provides the best quality image for viewing the text.

Option #2: Ttake a screenshot of your Wordle using Jing, SnagIT, MWSnap or Skitch (read this edublogger post to learn about screencapture tools).

I tried option one and was mostly successful. ou can see that I did not completely capture the image but I did manage to get the “dock” in the screen capture.  Something to work on… Also, the Wordle should be animated.

Here’s my first attempt at uploading a Wordle into my blog. It was easy to do (create a Wordle, copy the embed code, create a new post, click on HTML, click on code and insert. Problem: the image is too small to see and when I tried to enlarge it with the drag feature, it looks blurry.  So I will consult the Edublogger and try again.

Teachers’ Corner Content Reading Strategies

Middle School High Five Program

Reading Quest strategy lessons

Resource Room reading comprehension

Greece k12 scaffolding children’s interaction with text

Readers Toolkit reading workshop content specific instruction

Read Write Think

Literacy.net

Reading Lady