Play on Wordles
June 25, 2008
This week there has been a fair bit of talk about Wordles. What this website does is take a bunch of words, or body of text and create word clouds using all the words. The more frequently the word is used the larger it is in the cloud.
Sue from Tassie wrote about Wordle in her blog, Ms. W and her SmartBoard and ended with the question – “How could doing this help you when studying for an exam or test?”
I was intrigued so I hopped on to Wordle and created my own word cloud. I chose to use my Delicious tags to create my Wordle cloud so that I could see at a glance my most popular bookmark tags. I was able to edit my Wordle by choosing alternate colour schemes, different fonts, and layout. 
As I played around with the different layouts and colours, I began to think about Sue’s question.
As teachers we are often trying to give our students strategies and tools to Visualise their Thinking. I can see how Wordles could help students -
- identify popular themes, concepts, words
- see the connections
- identify patterns
- group
- summarise
- analyse
- revise
- conclude
- create new knowledge
I like this tool 
What do others think?
Entry Filed under: ICT, learning. Tags: ICT, tag cloud, thinking, tool, visualise, Wordle.
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1.
Miss W. | June 26th, 2008 at 8:40 am
Thanks for linking to my blog, Helen. One thing I was disappointed about though, when using wordle, was that when I showed the class my blog post, the wordle image had been filtered out by the department and that was with me logged in as a teacher.
As you mention, there are so many different ways a student could use wordle as part of their learning. I hope I can get it unblocked at school.
2.
helenotway | June 26th, 2008 at 8:46 am
Sue, I wonder if you talk to your technician you may be able to get in unblocked. Worth a try.
3.
Jo McLeay | July 10th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
Helen I love the fact that your discovery of a new tool leads you to think about how it could be used to help the students. I like the fact that you used your delicious tags and that then goes on to make me think about using delicious and diigo with students. When you have to think about tagging anything – a concept or a website or anything you are making knowledge too. I am definitely going to use those two ideas together: wordle and tagging, in classes this semester.
4.
helenotway | July 11th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
Jo, thanks for your comment. it will great to hear about how you go this semester with Wordle and tagging.
5.
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