Wordle/ Poll Everywhere

Wordle is a free program on the Internet that throws words or phrases together in a creative way. It bases the size of the font on how many times a word is typed during the creation of a Wordle page. The more times a certain word is typed, the larger it is, and the less a word is typed the smaller it is. It is very useful when you are wanting a creative way to show results of a poll question.
Poll Everywhere is also a free program on the Internet that allows anyone to create a poll that can be anonymously answered by anyone visiting the site. The poll can be answered by internet or by texting your answer. All you have to do is set up an account, and choose between a multiple choice or open-ended question.

In class, we used Wordle to show the results of our 'Poll Everywhere' poll. After the results were in, we entered the data into Wordle, and got a creative way to show the results of the poll.

If I were to use these programs in a class, I think I would want to use them at the beginning of the year. This is a good activity to do because the kids are still on a 'Summer high' and care more about what everyone else did over the summer than learning. I would do something similar to what we did in class.  This is a fun and easy thing for the kids to do to introduce them to the class. I would have the students  create their own polls and insert the results into Wordle. The poll questions should be questions that help the students, as well as myself,  get to know a little more about one another.  This would introduce them to the tools, and we would utilize these tools to do assignments in the future. This would go along with the ISTE standards, by introducing students to different forms of technology and make them comfortable using technology as a tool in the future.