Blog Wars

The other evening I was flipping through Netflix trying to find a movie for my students to watch before they began their Field Day activities.  I came across the movie titled Harriet the Spy: Blog Wars.  The title caught my attention because after creating my own blog for class, I could not believe that there was a movie centered on student blogs.  The movie was based on a Harriet going head to head with the most popular student, Marion Hawthorne, competing to become the official blogger of their high school class.

In the movie, the students all seemed to be active bloggers through writing and commenting on others blogs.  I thought the fact the Hollywood created a movie based on blogging was interesting.  This movie was created in 2010 and here it is 2014 and I am just learning about blogging and actively using it.  After watching the movie, I realized that technology is very much a part of my student’s everyday lives.  Further, I need to find ways to help my students use blogs and begin to blog because this is their future.

As a result of watching this movie, I decided to try another piece of new technology and that is Wordle.  Wordles are word clouds that can be created with text that you provide.  I decided to create one based on the movie.  I included characters, themes, setting, and anything else I thought related to blogging and the movie.  Now make sure you write your words in another document then copy and paste.  I just typed all my words right into Wordle and when I tried to add more words, all the words were gone.  Therefore, I had to type the in Microsoft Word first, then copy and paste them into Wordle.  Lesson learned.

Then I saw that I could create one just by writing my blog’s URL in the link box.

Wordles are easy and fun to create you just need words!  I hope you decide to try to create one.