More than just knowing stuff! » tool http://helenotway.edublogs.org Helen's thoughts on learning. Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:05:24 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.2 en hourly 1 Play on Wordles http://helenotway.edublogs.org/2008/06/25/play-on-wordles/ http://helenotway.edublogs.org/2008/06/25/play-on-wordles/#comments Wed, 25 Jun 2008 12:15:32 +0000 helenotway http://helenotway.edublogs.org/?p=69 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?

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