The Wonderful World of Wordle

Wordle is the grrrrreat!

You can easily create word clouds by copying and pasting text into the space provided. Then you can change the font, the layout, and the colours to make the cloud represent your artistic intentions. The more a word occurs in the text, the larger it will be in the word cloud. It's easy and so much fun!

When I first decided to play with Wordle, my mind automatically went to Dr Seuss. After all he has the most amazing way with words. As a matter of fact, it wouldn't surprise me if he is somehow connected to the word "wordle"...:) I easily found a reader's theatre version of one of my favourite Seuss stories, copied and pasted it into the Create window, pressed Go and voila! Can you tell which story I chose?

Obviously someone does "not-like-them" in the Seuss cloud. I think this would be a great little exercise on identifying the main idea in a piece of text, whether it be fiction or nonfiction. The larger words help the viewer quickly and easily identify the main idea.

Guess the Wordle is a great site that you can use with your students in order to guess the topic of the Wordle. Another great strategy for practicing finding the main idea.

I recently read an ISTE magazine article, where a middle school teacher, Samantha Morra, wrote about how she uses Wordle for all sorts of great things. She spoke of having her students go to the Our Documents website (obviously American) and choosing a document from the 100 Milestone Documents on the site. Her students had the most amazing conversations about the information shown in their clouds. I wondered what that might look like and decided to find a document on the Rights of the Child - copied into the Wordle window and this is what it looked like:

Ms Morra also spoke about a student putting her book report into Wordle. When it created a cloud the word "also" appeared as the largest word. The student decided that perhaps she used that word too much. Talk about a seize-the-moment teaching opportunity!

So I noticed that you can make a Wordle out of your blog feed. I decided to create one with my blog to see what it would look like:

Guess I use the word "just" too much??? Hmmmm...