Sunday, December 7, 2008

Wordle

My friend, Melanie Holtsman, introduced me to a wonderful website, Wordle. Here's what the website said about it: "Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends."

Now, how can this help your teaching??? Well, imagine how great this would be for Writing. You could have a student type up his/her work, and then paste it into Wordle. Let me guess what words will be biggest!.....SAID...AND THEN... This is a great tool to help writers become more aware of their word choice. And it's just plain FUN!

I was also challenged to make a Wordle of my classroom blog to see what words are emphasized each month. It's neat to see what we're talking about the most. Here's mine for December 7th - Wordle

You can tell that our emphasis is our Social Studies projects. I'd love to see what the Wordle looks like at the end of the year.

Try out a Wordle today!

1 comment:

Melanie Holtsman said...

Alice,
I LOVE that you are writing this blog to share with your colleagues what you are doing and learning each day with technology. Once you get started, and you have critical friends to go to for questions....it can snowball into a huge movement! Kudos to you for getting the ball rolling and being that friend for your team members!