filed under Best of the Web November 20th, 2008 Richard Anderson
Wordle.net - Create Word Clouds online
Wordle.net is an online tool for creating “word clouds”. A word cloud is a visual representation of words in a piece of text, in which words are sized according to the frequency in which they appear. Here is an example, based upon the current content of the RSS newsfeed from the CLC website. (What is RSS? - BBC Website)
Working in Wordle is very easy; simply paste a piece of text into the website, or give it the address of a website or RSS newsfeed, and your word cloud will be quickly generated. You then have the chance to choose the style, orientation and colour of the text. Wordle will automatically ignore common words (”the”, “a”, “to” and so on).
One annoyance is that there is no easy way to just save the word cloud image that Wordle generates - you will have to use the Print Screen key and paste into a document, or use screen grab software to pull out the finished image.
How might Wordle be used in lessons? Here are a few ideas:
- Create a picture of the language used by children in a piece of creative writing. (This would be particularly easy if student work is published onto a blog, as the RSS feed from the blog would generate the word map).
- Save Wordle word maps for different pieces of student work over the year. Compare the maps - how has their use of language changed (and hopefully improved)?. Are they using more descriptive language?
- Give students an open-ended question to answer (maybe in science or history, for example). Use the Wordle Map to highlight the kinds of language they use in response. Are some words used inappropriately? Are there synonyms or more precise words that would work better?
- Compare two pieces of text - maybe different styles of poetry, or political propaganda from different viepoints
Many thanks to Simon Mills at http://twowhizzy.blogspot.com for highlighting Wordle to me.
Update - I’ve just come across this article on Rodd Lucier’s Clever Sheep Blog - “Top 20 uses for Wordle“. Some really ingenious ideas!