Warmups and Wordle

Wordle

What: Wordle is a wonderful introduction to word clouds - visualising thematic ideas in a text. It highlights the more common words in a text and emphasises them in a word 'cloud'. Allows students to experiment with the emphasis their words have in a text. It also introduces color and writing direction, font and style as thematic influences.

Ease of use: Simple!

Writing application: There really are many, many ways to use Wordle. I've outlined a few below, but I'm certain that once you have a handle on this tool, you'll find your own unique approaches.

Wordle is quick way to warm up students to the idea of a flexible narrative. Have them prepare a word document with a story - (it can be something they've written previously). Simply paste it into the word cloud box, and click 'Go'.

Allow students to experiment with the font, layout, color until they recieve a desired effect. You can supplement a discussion with relevant points outlined in the discussion section of 'A classroom approach to DN' [.doc].

Wordle is also a wonderful tool for reflection, and an engaging way for students to focus on grammer, vocabulary and meaning in a body of text. Wordle makes these tasks accessible and motivating.

Suited: To a range of learning abilities - easy to learn, with enough depth to explore throughout a full 50 min lesson.

Teaching with an existing text:

There are so many ways of explore Wordle in the classroom, it's difficult to know where to start!

• Cut and paste a students work into Wordle to help them focus on what words they over use in their work.
• Cut and paste an existing body of work (the first act from Hamlet for example) into Wordle to discover common language and themes explored in the text.
• Cut and paste articles from the media into Wordle to help students examine the main themes and ideas in the piece.

Update: You might also try Classic Reader, for texts to use in Wordle ... thousands of titles listed for free.

Using Wordle with an existing text helps make it accessible.

A great activity you can do is to build a Wordle page from a news article and then ask students to guess what it's about. You'll find your class loves this detective style activity, and the close examination of the text is wonderful for building vocabulary. If you feel the Wordle image gives away to easily what the article is about, simple remove or add words to adjust the image.

There's a huge body of evidence that supports the sorts of prereading exercises Wordle is ideal for in a classroom. When working with an existing class text it's a wonderful application for gaining a thematic impression of the writing. If you're working with a class novel it can be used to highlight common elements in the text, common words and phrases ... the list goes on. You'll find the list of things you can do with this little app are endless!

An alternative to Wordle, though not as flexible a solution, is Tag Crowd. This alternate resource is great for the straightforward way in which you can manipulate the frequency of words appearing in the cloud. It lacks some of the features that make Wordle so much fun in the classroom however, font changing, cloud shape changes etc. Still, it's a solid alternative if you're looking to investigate all the options.

Another fantastic alternative is Tagul which has the added advantage of rollover effects, allows you to embed your clouds in your website once you've completed them, and you can create an account and save your work. In addition there are fancy shapes to use with your cloud. Worth exploring.