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Sep. 5
Wordle is such a great site to help students visualize writing. On the surface, it seems like an over-simplistic Web 2.0 tool. However, when used thoughtfully, it is a wonderful tool to enhance your students’ writing.
Let’s look at some examples of Wordle and try it out for ourselves. Go to www.wordle.net. Then, click the Create tab.
In the box that says Paste in a bunch of text, let’s paste in the Gettysburg Address. Click this link and copy the text of the speech. http://tinyurl.com/5o9ny
Once you have pasted in the text, click Go. After a short wait, your word cloud appears. The first reaction is usually…”whoa…that’s cool.”
To change the look of your word cloud, click Randomize or play with the font, layout and color menus.
Try this:
· Limit your Wordle to say, the top 30 words in the text. You do this by clicking Layout and then Maximum Words. Limiting the number of words can bring clarity to the word cloud.
· Delete unwanted words by right-clicking a word in the cloud and choosing Delete.
At this point you may be thinking, “This looks cool…but how can it be used in my class?” I thought the exact same thing when I was introduced to this site. Since then I have seen several excellent applications of this tool. Let’s look at a few ideas.
Language Arts class is a perfect place to use Wordle. A simple and effective project is to have students create a word cloud of a poem they have written. Students will see a word cloud representation of their work and can re-edit to make sure they are getting their message across to the reader. When complete, have students embed their word cloud into the document in which they wrote their poem. Please see the Robert Frost example.
A similar technique can be used when students are learning to write paragraphs in essays. You may want them to vary their vocabulary so that no word in the word cloud is much larger than the rest.
Use Wordle as a starting point for mind-mapping. Let’s go back to the Gettysburg Address example. Students can Wordle famous texts and then branch discussions based upon the word cloud. This is a great way to start a discussion and a way to let students visualize text. Please see Lincoln example.
How do you get a word cloud out of Wordle? You may have discovered you can’t copy and paste the image. If you’re using Windows Vista or Windows XP Tablet Edition, you can use the snipping tool to snip out your word cloud (that’s what I used for my examples). Or, you can capture the entire screen and edit the image in any image-editing software. Click here for instructions: http://take-a-screenshot.org/
In summary, I believe using Wordle can help meet the learning style differences of your students. Some may have great difficulty grasping meaning of text. Displaying it in a word cloud can help your visual learners. As an added benefit kids love it. Let me know if you have any questions or want to share your Wordle ideas.
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