I’ve mentioned Wordle in a number of posts so I thought it was about time I talked specifically about this wonderful little program and its potential for use in the classroom…
In their own words…
“Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends”.
Simply put – you enter text into the box – click ‘create’ and a word cloud is generated; giving the most frequently used words more prominence.
Playing Around – Pick the Poem
While I was getting used to the format I used some classic poems, simply inputting the text and clicking ‘create’…
Can you guess what they are? - hold your mouse over the picture to see the title and poet
Educational Use…
- What you just did
- Scrapbooking
- Analysis of text – Newspaper Articles, Science Reports, Poems – what is the key subject matter?
- Vocab list
- High-frequency ‘no-excuses’ word wall (display those words that should never be wrong – all classes should have this)
- Analysis of key words
- Analysis of over-used words (we do this a lot)
E.g. – One of our very first Myst lessons was to write a description of Myst Island. My guys all wrote sentences in their Myst Journals, edited them, then typed them up into a Wiki. We then copied all 20 pieces of text into Wordle… this was the result…
We then used this image to analyse the key words the guys had chosen to describe the island…
Were they too simple?
Could we do better?
This led on to lessons using Visuwords, thesaurus’, similes and metaphorical expressions.
NB: Important – the standard link to Wordle (http://www.wordle.net) takes you to the home page. This page has examples of user-wordle docs. They are not censored. It is wise to link directly to the create page (http://www.wordle.net/create) thus avoiding images created using the text from a letter to Playboy (true story!)
And finally, what does this Wordle show?
