Wordle

A friend has just let me know about Wordle - an interactive site that will make a word cloud out of blogs and text and it is such a fun visual context that I got to thinking how I could use it in teaching. I have just created a word cloud using Wordle for my blog to see what themes are currently arising. See below


As to how we can use it teaching, well it is a nice way of visualising reflections and ramblings, and for those of us using blogging as a way of asking students to reflect on their experiences, you can use wordle to augment those reflections. creating a word cloud periodically on your blog, will allow you to see if there are any changes in the way you are reflecting, if the major lines of thought are changing. As well as being a fun thing to do, it is quite quick - once you have made sure that Java is up and running and for most it probably is and there are simple embed codes which can just be copied and pasted into your blog.

From a cross curricular tool it can be used to highlight aspects of English, to motivate children into story telling, or to use to highlight Key words, the pupils can be asked to pick a key word from the word cloud and attempt to deine it. I am sure there are many more applications and as I experiment with it I will let you know.