June 18, 2009
Wordle..?!
What wordle says about itself:
“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.”
Possible ways of using wordle in the classroom:
- check style of piece of writing (often used words will stand out)
- create sentences, e.g. if-sentences
- collect/ introduce vocabulary
- capturing key points
- introductory exercises – text in wordle -let students guess what it could be about
- work with poems, maybe dissolve them in wordle and create a new one
- reflection on specific topic
- …
I’m not yet sure if every of the above mentioned possibilities is really useful and feasible, but what I’m certain about is that wordle has a lot of potential for the classroom. The key-fact here is simply that it is a new and different way of doing familiar things – more diversity is always motivating. Aditionally, every wordle is an eye-catcher and thus will increase students interest. Of course only as long as it stays a new and interesting thing – so I would advise to use wordle only occassionally as an addition to other methods: diversity is the key!
*sTavRoULa* said,
June 18, 2009 at 2:35 pm
When I first looked at the homepage of wordle I thought its just a kind of a game and not really helpful for the classroom. But you managed it to convince me of its useful application within a English lesson. Very important your statement : “diversity is the key!” ;D A teacher should introduce wordle to class but combine its function with other media.