Wednesday, July 23, 2014
Visuwords - be careful
Oh, wow! I was just looking through my Visuwords examples, as I wanted to explain how each of my examples would be used in the classroom. The "board" Visuwords would be part of a lesson during the spelling list of homophones. The "scared" Visuwords would be used in October for a writing assignment. Students love this assignment where they get to write their own scary story that will be read to the class on Halloween. We turn off the lights and pull down the shades. We pull the blinds, and then I put on a youtube video of a crackling fire behind the readers! It's great. One of the skills I stress, in addition to descriptive words, is to show the reader how scared the character is, as opposed to saying "Bob was scared." I thought the Visuwords would be a good way to come up with other ways of saying it. Just be careful, though, as I just saw the Visuwords I posted has "shitless" as one of the nodes on the word "afraid." I was unable to figure out if I could take that particular node off the diagram, and I tried to locate a way to contact the company to discuss this. My advice: just be careful, and remember to vet the words you plan to use.
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Yikes! That's a really great example of how important it is for us to actually use all of these Web 2.0 tools ourselves before ever introducing them to students. Your post is a perfect example of something that could happen if we get too eager to use a tool and don't explore as many of the features as possible - and with actual content - before diving into using them in the classroom!
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