Wordle is a free resource to teachers, offering a kid-friendly and colorful alternative to paper and pencil when brainstorming.
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Wordle
Wordle is a popular Web 2.0 tool that is becoming more and more common in elementary classrooms for its ability to create colorful, interesting word clouds. Word clouds can be used for a variety of purposes, in both whole group, small group, or individual learning experiences. A wordle might be used as a tool for collecting content-specific vocabulary words (see example below), a classroom resource displaying character traits/juicy adjectives/writing topics, or as an assessment tool for checking a student's understanding of big ideas in a lesson.
Wordle is a free resource to teachers, offering a kid-friendly and colorful alternative to paper and pencil when brainstorming.
Wordle is a free resource to teachers, offering a kid-friendly and colorful alternative to paper and pencil when brainstorming.
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I use wordle a the beginning of every year. I have my students write their philosophy of expectations for English class and then I take everyone's and put it into wordle. It's fun to have a conversation of what they expect based on which words are larger. Fun! :)
ReplyDeleteI used Wordle this week to describe technology. At the end of the unit, we are going to create another Wordle and compare the 2 for changes. I think this is a great activity to use in a telecollaborative project to quickly and accurately discover what are the "big words" for different groups!
ReplyDeleteI love using Wordle and my students love it too! One game that I've used Wordle for is the "Flyswatter" Game ("Matamoscas" in Spanish). I create a Wordle with their vocabulary words and display it up on the LCD screen. The students are split into 2 teams and one student from each time comes up and stands with their back to the screen. I yell out a word and the 1st student to turn around, find it in the Wordle, and smack it with the flyswatter wins a point for their team. They looove it :)
ReplyDeleteCommenting on a post won't allow me to add an image of my Flyswatter Wordles, so I'll post them on my blog and you can see them here: http://lcarlwebtools.blogspot.com/
I love your idea for a vocabulary game using Wordle, Lisa! I know my kids would get a kick out swatting at the screen. Thanks for the tip. It would also be a great opportunity for students to identify synonyms and antonyms. Fun!
DeleteMaybe I could use Wordle for editing purposes. It seems easy enough for students to copy and paste parts or even whole paragraphs of their writing into Wordle. Much of my student writing beyond the first draft and revisions is done using computers. The use of Wordle would be an easy step in the process. If I understand things correctly, words that are used more frequently appear larger than others in the Wordle document. I guarantee that said would be the largest word on most student papers, possibly followed by the word then. It would be an easy way for me to show that certain words are being used far too much. Students could also use it to self check their writing for overused words in the future. I don't know if this would work but it is worth a try. Maybe a Wordle document would reveal other things about their writing as well. I'll have to do some analytical work and some trials to see. Thanks for suggesting some great uses for this tool and making me think about possible uses for editing by including the words "juicy adjectives" in your post. That was the spark that got me thinking about using it to improve student writing.
ReplyDeleteI decided to try it. I wrote a silly little paragraph in which every sentence had the word said. Sure enough, the word "said" was in giant letters with "the" in medium sized letters and everything else much smaller. This is the beauty of simple Web 2.0 technologies. It is easy to try out an idea like this in 30 seconds. It is even easy enough to try it out in the classroom, and if it doesn't work, you haven't invested much in the technology.
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