New Beginnings

I am not sure how anyone else felt last night - but it felt like New Year's Eve to me. Anticipation, celebration, a new beginning this morning. I was connected to what was happening not just by the media reports but by my Twitter friends - I had more updates than I could count. I was so glued to the technology keeping me up to date with a friend in NYC, my friends here in Buffalo and my virtual friends everywhere that my phone was actually taken away from me for an hour to have a conversation with the friend actually sitting in front of me. Perhaps I was too connected?

This morning - the Twitterverse and my feeds have been alive with comments and blogs and links and oh so much to read and take in. If as Cindy Citizen I feel this way - how must President-Elect Obama feel? So many Monday morning quarterbacks referred to him as "our first Internet President" this morning that it made me really think about the power I saw on display yesterday. Power of people, power of connections, power of the process.

In thinking about helping our students process this a bit - so that the results of this election continue to have meaning in our classrooms - I put the words of McCain's elegant concession speech into Wordle:




I then searched to see if someone had already done the same with Obama'a acceptance speech (many had!) and I liked this one:



I think this would make a great compare/contrast exercise for students to think about the emotions and words that each man portrayed on this historic night!! And a great use of one of my favorite visual tools!