Monday 6 July 2009

Wordle: my top 7 uses

Wordle is a wonderful tool to create word clouds and work with vocabulary. When I first came across it last year, lots of possible uses came to my mind!!!

An important thing about how Wordle organises the display of words is that the size of each word in the display is related to that word's frequency in the text you enter. So that, if you want to enter a list of vocabulary items for a topic, you might want to enter the topic word a few times so that it appears bigger than the others. If, however, you are working with text from another source, the resulting Wordle will show that the bigger the words, the more frequent their appearance in the text you entered.

Here's my top 7 uses for Wordle (in no particular order)

1- Entering a speech and analysing the ideas in it. For example, if you entered Barack Obama's acceptance speech, you would see what ideas were more important in his speech by looking at the bigger words. You could also compare his acceptance speech and his inauguration speech to see if there were many differences (as shown in the pictures below).































2- Analysing a literary character either by entering his/her own words in the literary work or by asking students to create a list of describing words for this character.


3- Revising vocabulary by entering a list of words related to a topic.


4- Analysing language use in writing essays by entering a whole essay text and checking for repeated words and concepts.


5- Entering the whole text for a book you are reading in order to: a) make predictions about the book before reading, or b) analysing themes after reading the book.


6- Creating a personal profile to introduce themselves at the beginning of the school year.


7- Creating a visual display of your subject's content to show in the classroom. In this case NLE stands for New Learning Environments.


Great ideas come with experimentation! Start Wordling!!!

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for sharing your ideas on how to use Wordle.

    ReplyDelete