Two Truths and a Lie Revised

I have been looking for a great way to introduce myself to my students at my new school. I thought that using an icebreaker activity would be a fun way to help my students get acquainted with me.  A classic ice-breaker activity is Two Truths and a Lie. 

Two Truths and a Lie is the a popular icebreaker game, in which someone shares two truths about themselves and a lie to the group. The group then tries to guess which one is a lie. 

Since I enjoy this game I decided that I will use it on the first day of library visits with my classes. Instead of playing the classic version, I created an interesting variation to the game using Popplet (Thanks to my partner teacher-librarian for introducing this tool to me). I like the idea of using a variation to the game since I don't want to use the same old icebreaker as every other teacher. 

A Popplet "is a big pinboard that you can put popples onto". In other words, a Popplet is a mind mapping application that allows you to collect documents, pictures, videos, and text in an organized manner. Here is the Popplet that I created to share with my middle school students:

As you can see, my Popplet is full of truths about me. However, one is a lie. When my library classes come visit me for orientation, I will show them my Popplet to introduce myself to them. I will then have the class guess which one isn't true. The student who guesses correct will win a small prize. 

Can you guess my lie? 

Back to School with Tagxedo

I absolutely love the idea found on Chad Lehman’s website using Wordle with his library students on the first day of school. Students created a word cloud with words of things they can do in the library. Instead of using Wordle though I would use another similar tool called Tagxedo. Tagxedo not only creates a word cloud out of the text you provide but it “turns words — famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters — into a visually stunning word cloud, words individually sized appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurrence within the body of text.”

Another great way to use word clouds in the library was found on Tara’s blog. She broke students up into small groups and had them list their favourite book titles or series.

Below is a Tagxedo made out of my blog.