Charter of Rights and Freedoms via Wordle

A couple of months ago I posted about a program called Wordle which allows you to create "word clouds" from a body of text or a blog. I had a couple of ideas but hadn't really thought that much more about it.

I was just listening to Eric Langhorst's podcast over at Speaking of History and he instantly got me interested in it again. Teaching about American government, he ran the US constitution through Wordle and created a great starting point for a class discussion. It's fun and engaging and immediately provides a windown into the focus of the document.

So of course I reached for our Canadian equivalent and ran the Charter of Rights and Freedoms through Wordle and got the following result:

Click on the link and try putting your own historical documents into Wordle - let's see what other results we can come up with.

Speaking of History Teacher's Who Blog.....

Speaking of History is a blog/podcast out of Liberty, Missouri, run by 8th grade American History Teacher Eric Langhorst. Not only does Eric have the sharpest looking header of any blog that I've seen, it's a great set up and looks like a terrific blog. I just listened to his post on a video called Please Vote for Me, a video about democracy in China that looks amazing.

I realized with this post and on Dan McDowell's that I need to start keeping track of these great history blogs so I'm adding a new sidebar with specifically history teachers who blog. In this case they happen to also blog about using technology in the classroom, but that doesn't necessarily have to be the case.

After speaking with Vincent Massey Collegiate I'm realizing more and more how these tools are so important to professional development and keeping in touch with amazing teachers like Eric and Dan. Welcome to Canada guys!