Keywords in E-Resumes - To teach keywords in a resume, I start by walking the class through an example.  Clown makes a good one, but any occupation will work.  With clown we come up with keywords like funny, juggle, red nose, big nose, make-up, etc. (phrases are considered keywords).  List them on the board as you go along.  Then we think of some of the word associated with the "soft" skills a good clown should have such as honest, dependable, reliable, friendly, etc.

Once the concept is understood, then we create individual keywords for individual resumes.  Each student takes a sheet of paper, and across the top should list their job title (that they are basing their resume on), and a one or two sentence job description.  Once this is done, each student is asked to list 50 keywords for their job.  Now for the fun part.  Once they've done this (and some of them will whine about it-don't you love being a teacher?), have them systematically pass their list to someone behind them, to the left, etc.  Then each person must add 5 more relevant keywords to the list!  Then they pass their papers four more times to four different people.  As a result, there should be 75 keywords on each page. (50 + 5 words X 5 people)  The result will be keywords the original author would not have come up with, and a broader concept of what keywords are.  (If you teach E-Commerce, this activity will also help them develop the mentality to create web page keyword lists, too--critical in getting your web page found by search engines!)

Mickey Kosloski
Virginia DECA