Telling Jewish Stories using Wordle

Students are each given a short, multimedia film from Centropa to watch. As they watch – they may need to watch it more than once – they are to write down words that important to the story: events (e.g., Kristallnacht), values (e.g., loyalty), or anything important to the person whose story they are watching (e.g., a violin, sports, family). Once they are clear about the story, they go to the Wordle website (http://www.wordle.net) and make a word cloud that accurately represents the story they watched. The more times they type in a word the larger that word will appear in the word cloud, and students can choose the colors of their Wordle. After they are done, each student projects his or her Wordle in front of the class and shares the story they learned with the others only using the Wordle as a guide. After each student has presented his or her Wordle, the teacher leads a class discussion about what Jewish life was like prior to the war, and any similarities or differences they saw in the stories from Serbia to Austria, Poland to Macedonia, Hungary to Greece.