Day 10 - Wordle

Wordle, or a word cloud, helps to interpret the meaning of the words by assigning font size according to how frequently the word appears in the targeted text. This is one of the most popular online tool with almost 14,000 visitors each day stopping by to do anything from fans typing in their favorite music videos, teachers analyzing literary texts, kids making signs, spouses writing love letters and journalists wordling political speeches.

Wordles have been used in a multitude of ways from PowerPoint slides, to pictures for T-shirts, magazine covers, scrapbooking layouts, birthday cards, Valentine’s wishes, Back to School night posters, Get to Know You activities on the first day of school to YouTube videos.

You name it, it’s probably been done in some form.

How?  Simple to do…. browse onto the Wordle page, paste in the text that you want to use for the word cloud and submit for processing. Within a few seconds, up comes a cloud from a randomly chosen style, color scheme and layout.  Then just keep experimenting with different settings until you’re pleased with how the image looks…customizing it to meet your needs perfectly.  It’s truly one of the easiest to use online tools.

How do I get the Wordle OUT?  The video above explains how to get the embed code for inserting in to a webpage or blog, but what if you just want to print your Wordle or insert it in a document?  Here is how to do that:  http://take-a-screenshot.org/

Here is a look at ideas where other teachers have found used Wordle to be a useful instructional tool.  Listed are a number of examples that may be helpful to get you thinking about how you could use this tool.

·         Spelling and learning new vocabulary words

·         Print a Wordle as a bookmark.

·         Use Wordle as another way to graph.

·         Wordles point out most in curriculum standards and can help analyze what skills or concepts are emphasized

·         Students can analyze their own writing by pasting in their drafts to see if they’ve used certain words or phrases too often.

·         Can help summarize big ideas of a chapter or passage of text.

·         Anything where time is of the essence and a picture can communicate the ideas more quickly than reading a large bit of text.

·         Have each student create their version of classroom rules, paste them all into Wordle and find the most common ideas that students agreed upon.

·         Create classroom polls where each child gets to enter one word on “what’s your favorite color?”