Wordle
You may have noticed that I'm a fan of 'pretty things' - avatars, Flickr photos, widgits etc - and also of words (current favourites include kerpoof as said by Drew Buddie) so when Wordle was recommended in last night's EdTechRoundup Flashmeeting, and I then saw a post by Langwitches in my Google Reader telling me that 'Wordle produces 'beautiful word clouds'', my interest was piqued.
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.
 |
and another for http://del.icio.us/whitehousecommon (my school del.icio.us account)
I love these visual representations of my bookmarks as they highlight the most popular tags so clearly(the text size for each word is related to the number of times it appears) and it's pleasing to see that the focus of my tagging is where I thought it was ;o)
You can also input random words to create a cloud. So I tried pasting my last blog post into the text box and came out with this -
There are some other great examples in the Wordle gallery including:
How to survive a Zombie attack
Here's a French one - very topical too -
Le Coupe d'Europe
and a Spanish one -
Inteligencia emocional
I think these are great fun and could be used in the classroom as a way of presenting information e.g. new vocabulary such as food and drink, things based on popularity when doing likes and dislikes as well as creating visual poems and stories. And how about inputting some text that children have written and graphically showing them how many times the word 'said' or 'went' appear - that should bring the point home ;o)
So let's get Wordle-ing!
I thought that could be a great way to encourage creative wrtiting: From the cloud to a poem or a story for instance...
Isabelle
http://isabellejones.blogspot.com
Isabelle Jones said... 16 June 2008 at 16:10
Exactly, Isabelle!
Lisa xx
lisibo said... 16 June 2008 at 16:44
I'm liking this a lot! Like Isabelle said: great for encouraging writing. I was also thinking of using it with my 6th formers to encourage speaking, showing them word clouds on the IWB. I teach them again on Wednesday, I'll probably blog about how it went!
Anonymous said... 16 June 2008 at 18:01
Great idea José! Think I'm going to see what happens if I use it for survey of favourite animals (Y4) and music (Y5).
Looking forward to your blog post (as always)!
Lisa xx
lisibo said... 16 June 2008 at 18:37
Post a Comment