This idea was presented at a Poster session titled "Unleash Cool Unknown Tools with Microsoft Word and OneNote." It wasn't on my list of Poster sessions to check out but I stopped in my tracks when I passed by her table and saw the presenter go over this Word feature I never knew existed and then she showed how it can be used in the classroom.
It is a feature in Word which is called Text-to-Table and it allows students, after typing their draft copy of a writing piece, to look at their document (for revision purposes) in a different way - by changing their paragraphs into single rows of text in a table.
Anyone who has taught children know that they HATE to review and revise their writing. They always think it is good on the first go round. I thought this was a unique way to teach students how to look at their writing line by line (in a table format), make their changes, and then revert it back to the paragraph form.
The presenter (Gwynn Moore - click for her ISTE presentation) put together the instructional video above on how it works. To see the video on YouTube - CLICK HERE.
This would be an idea for our middle and high school students (who have 1:1 Dell Tablets). I plan to pass it on to our literacy coaches in those areas to highlight its use in the classroom.
Where does Wordle come in? I was sharing this idea with another teacher in a session and she said she has had students copy and paste paragraphs of their writing in Wordle. The premise of Wordle is that the more you use a word the bigger it becomes in the Word Cloud. She has students look at those words that are large and asks them to look at overused words to see if they can make any changes to improve their writing. I thought that was a pretty original way to use Wordle in the classroom, and it went along with this post, so I included it.
Comments