Suzanne Rogers's Page

Googlewave is an incredible addition to the repetoire of an English teacher. As an eager recipient of the invitation to wave, I have sought to find ways to incorporate wave into our daily classroom and homework experiences. Teaching in a charter comes with its own delights and dilemmas. The students at our school live within a 45 minute radius of the school. The students already voraciously use social media in their private social lives. Googlewave puts their school work and social lives on a the same platform. They can simultaneously socially network and complete schoolwork. Students can easily ask both each other and the teacher questions of both private and public origins.

To date, my English classes have taken collaborative notes, analyzed texts, published poetry, commented on others work and taken meetings and collaborative group projects. They are inspired by the googlewave platform and eager to stay on top of the wave.
Suzanne Rogers
suzieswimz@googlewave.com
12/8/09

December 14, 2009

I've been learning from my PLN about using Wordle to analyze essays. What a neat idea! I tried it out myself with a This I Believeessay. I simply pasted the essay in Wordle and created a word cloud.
http://thisibelieve.org/essay/5561/
https://wave.googleusercontent.com/wave/thumbnail/Screen%20shot%202009-12-13%20at%209.45.16%20AM_thumb.png?id=p_bq5Kc82&key=AH0qf5y1XvCio5WUD-hXD2GUUTO9ZBqhFA

My AP Lang students will be writing their This I Believe essays this week. They will post their wordle into the class wave for comments by other students. Ideally, the wordle will fairly fully present the main idea of their essay. I've enjoyed using googlewave with my classes. It opens another avenue of communication between students and teachers. They will ask questions on the wave that they wouldn't ask in class or take the time to write an email. I can answer their question and then delete it from the wave if it is not pertinent to the task at hand.