Wordles of Character
By blog on Jan 31, 2010 in 1) Events and Training days, 2) Useful n Interesting
The first outcome of our “Bringing The Village To Life” project at Whissendine C.E.Primary School was a set of powerful images, which the children created through quite a complex, yet, in reality, acheivably-simple procedure.
It involved them working across a few programs and resources, and having to keep track of a collection of thought processes. They also had to “think on their feet” and work out exactly HOW to succeed in the challenge.
A shared learning journey.
They started by brainstorming deeper elements of their “character”. For example, instead of “My name is… I am forty six years old… I work in the church”, they developed some really detailed “back-stories” and “realisms”.
Some of these were quite poignant: “Candles! I love them and loathe them. Never did I think that a moment of distraction could have ended in such pointless distruction. OK. It wasn’t exactly the end of the whole church, thank heavens, but this altar cloth will never be able to be used in a big service again!”
We then searched for a photographic texture that captured a moment in their “life”.
One of the best places to find such images, is CGTextures.com which has a huge selection of textures, organised into categories such as metal, doors, water, manmade, brick, natural etc.
Well done to Marcel Vijfwinkel, and crew, for making these textures “Free” to use (but do check the licences, to make sure it fits your setting).
The texture the children chose, could have been a bit of putty in a brick wall that they had “picked at, in a moment of frustration, when outside a neighbour’s gate, waiting to apologise, reluctantly, for a misunderstanding the previous day”.
It could have been the metal door, padlocked firmly closed, that contained the chicken-feed on the farm (“The wasted time I have spent standing outside this door, patting my boilersuit pockets, wondering where on earth I have left the key, …again! Why do I even bother locking it? Chickens aren’t likely to break in for their food, are they?”)
They then used Wordle to make a collection of carefully chosen words and phrases that captured an essence of the character. (Yes! You can have short phrase in Wordle: join words together with the ” ~ ” symbol e.g. kind~at~heart) If they felt that “Patience” was key attribute, then repeated that word a few times , or”weighted” it, so that it appeared larger than the rest of their selection.
This could have been effective in its own right, but they then bought those words to life:
First, they inserted the texture image they had found and “sent” that “to the back” on a PowerPoint slide, enlarging it until it fitted the whole slide.
Next, they took a screen shot of the finished Wordle picture (when they were pleased with the layout, colour scheme and other elements). They pasted that picture in to the PowerPoint slide and, cropped it until there was only the text.
After this, they used the “Select Transparent Colour” tool, and eliminated the unwanted background colour from the Wordle image.
The final step was to add a text box or subtle word art, that contained their slightly longer section of prose. This meant that the ended up with a combination of carefully chosen words and images, summing up elements of a life.
The children refined those images by adding drop shadows to the isolated Wordle text, and few other little ruses, which resulted in a professional-looking piece of graphic design.
Click the image to the left, for just one example. More to follow…
Some even faded elements in, subtly introducing another level of communication.
Tim, a lovely sequence of ideas. I really like how you have brought them together.
On a classroom management note, some of the tasks are technical and I know from experience some children will take longer than others.
How would you advise keeping everyone moving forward yet not overloading them at the start with instructions?
Do you explain each step together as a class or the whole thing? I know each class will be different but I’d be interested to hear what you suggest.
Tom Barrett | Feb 1, 2010 | Reply
I love this use of Wordle Tim – thanks & see you again soon I hope
Carol Rainbow | Feb 1, 2010 | Reply
Excellent twist on Wordle. My gr. 7/8’s will love this for our next project. They will write their own character traits and describe how they will be useful in their career path. Thanks.
Heather Durnin | Feb 1, 2010 | Reply
Wow! Brilliant!
Just had someone asking me how to “output stuff from Wordle” and I had no idea. I actually couldn’t see the point of spending that much time and effort generating ideas only to “print” them off. This gives you more creative freedom – how do you know all these things? You are the man!
Michael Keenan | Feb 1, 2010 | Reply
Hi All and thanks for your comments
)
How do I introduce things Tom? Good question that takes a bit of answering. It may not make sense unless you’ve seen us do it. But hey ho…
I always aim to make the introduction of the “process” part of the “story” that builds up to the task. In other words, if we tell children that “if you press the X icon such and such will happen” they will always only press the X icon. They rise to challenges when they feel that they are part of the “finding out how to do it”. A shared learning journey. (I did really know all of the things we “found out”, but I pretended I didn’t. One of the oldest teacher tricks in the book).
In this case, I wanted them to remember that the outcome was more important than the technology. It’s what they say rather than what they use to say it.
So, what we did was to look at how we could develop characters further than just “I am so and so. I am forty-six years old. etc etc”. We worked out that a character description could be a collection of well chosen words and a longer piece of text.
I showed them Wordle (this group had never seen any of the things we used, apart from PowerPoint).
We made a Wordle, looking at layout etc.
Part of this stage was that we “worked out” the text needed to be written in something like Notepad, so that we could go back and refine it. If we didn’t, when we took a screen shot, it would have wiped the first text off our clipboard and we couldn’t revise it.
Then we had the “problem” of how to capture that Wordle picture. Someone remembered they had done a screenshot by accident. “Could we use that?” (If someone hadn’t suggested it, then I could have dripped it in perhaps).
All the way through this we were still focussed on the power of the words they were choosing. An English journey as much as an ICT one. All of the “Oooh. Look… um… wow… ” moments meant that we had little flags we could refer back to when they tackled the task. They had laptops with them so there were moments of trying, but I encouraged them to take in all of the other ideas and suggestions, rather than getting tangled up in the trying too soon.
(I am waffling on aren’t I?! It was just another lesson, and it is always hard to analyse what you do, isn’t it? But, it’s worth trying. Thank you for your patience.
I then showed them the screenshot and pasting in to a PowerPoint slide bit. They thought I was showing them keyboard shortcuts and so the task actually went smoother than me just saying “click here do this and that”. (“What! Another objective?!” Yes. …and bloomin’ why not? They go for it.)
We were lucky to be working in a school with good equipment (laptops and MS Office – some 2003, some 2007 and that actually helped rather than hindered because there was always a buzz of helping each other out.) One group actually found out how to join words together in Wordle (~) by looking it up in the help section. Another group even found out and showed me, who genuinely didn’t know, how to change to lower case when they had written al IN UPPER CASE. I knew how to in 2003 but not 2007. (it is next to the red capital A icon).
We also had a whole morning. But that was a cross between their literacy and ICT times, just mashed together.
The other elements, like choosing the transparent colour, fades etc, were introduced when through the morning as groups found it out (or in other words I had shown them, or hinted at, how they might discover it).
The technological challenges for this group seemed to dissapate because they remained zoomed in on the Communication rather than Technology aspect; they wanted to bring their imaginary village alive through the characters.
So much so that, when played a game of “L.O. and behold”, (Oh that’s another story) they came up with so many things that they thought they had been learning (“problem solving when we don’t know what the outcome is” being one of them).
Right! Long waffle over and it doesn’t really answer your question.
We each do it in our ways. I learn a load from the way you describe your processes. Nickin’ ideas and sharing is how we all take off and fly eh?
Let’s see if we can arrange to see each other in action.
All the best
Tim
blog | Feb 1, 2010 | Reply
What a truly inspirational idea. Love it!
2sparkley | Feb 2, 2010 | Reply
What an awesome and creative exercise! Also great the way you introduced them to some great online resources.
Another great project could be to build a blog for them to chronicle the day’s happenings. You can use free software called Wordpress. Plus there are lots of free design themes and feature add ins to.
James Todd
James Todd | Feb 3, 2010 | Reply
Wow this is awesome. I will be sharing this with my class tomorrow. THanks!
Karen Kliegman | Feb 4, 2010 | Reply
I liked your post and really enjoyed your comment back to Tom. Thanks!
Melanie Matthews | Feb 4, 2010 | Reply
How did you get the background image to gradually fade out? Was that done in powerpoint or photoshop? I love that effect, but couldn’t figure out how to do it in powerpoint. Thanks!!
Karen Kliegman | Feb 5, 2010 | Reply
Hi Karen
Everything was done in PowerPoint
The only other source was Wordle
All done with custom animation and fading in or out
Fun eh?
blog | Feb 6, 2010 | Reply