I recently took over a support call, which a colleague escalated (ie he couldn’t fix the problem), regarding an online application called Wordle.
I’m so glad he did!
Wordle for those new to it is a Java based tool that creates word clouds from a piece of text, or even a URL, you provide.
The tag clouds could be used as a lesson introduction for pre reading a topic – paste in a few chapters from a creative commons book, paste in the text from a news article etc or to quickly introduce key words from a topic in visually attractive and engaging way.
Type face, font colour, text orientation and background colour can all be edited so a variety of styles can be used to suit the subject matter.
From my initial play with Wordle I can’t see any word limits – I used the entire text from the Wikipedia entry of WWII (over 8200 words).
Students can then title, attribute and tag their creations and save them in the Wordle Gallery.
Overall it’s an excellent tool and currently one of my favourite playthings!
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