Wordle

Wordle will not run in Chrome.

Wordle is a very simple and useful web 2.0 tool. It’s so easy to use that you don’t even need an account to make one. You can instantly start creating your design by just accessing the website. Making Wordles can take as much or as little time as you want. The more words you add to it, the more time it will take, obviously. Some word bubbles are very detailed and creative, and these take a while to create, however Wordles can just as easily be used to make quick and easy projects. -PW

I used this tool for a class and found it be very fun to use. You are able to express your creativity with the different usage options. There are also numerous uses for the finished products. I would give this a 3 out of five because of some problems i encountered. First, it doesn’t work on a number of search engines, as i had trouble on Firefox and Internet Explorer. I also did not like how you cant go back to edit the words you want to use. I enjoyed it, even though it has its errors.

This looks like a really fun way to get students to want to write more. I would use this to publish students work after they have edited and revised it. It would look really cool around the room also. I think that this is very helpful for showing students during the writing process a few very repetitive words that they are using. Overall this looks like a really fun website to use.

I create a unit overview before beginning a new lesson. I put all into a wordle and have it projected on the screen as students enter. After they view it, I ask what the topic is that we are going to be discussing is based on the wordle.

Use it as an icebreaker activity for the beginning of school for students to describe themselves.
Also great to generate vocab for academic subjects.

I love Wordle. Use it to: explore keywords in a topic, create posters, see which the most popular words are in a text, play with words or ask students to ‘get creative' with words. You can use other people's Wordles or create your own. You can copy and paste text or create your own.

I used it to explore a key scene in Shakespeare's Macbeth play. The words death and Macbeth were prominent! I also used it when training staff by putting the OFSTED criteria for outstanding teaching into the Wordle box. It seems that learning and progress are key.

You can choose your own colour themes and fonts to achieve the effect or clarity that you are seeking. It is worth exploring. Have a go.

I also use Wordle with vocabulary. My 11th grade AP students are fairly sophisticated with their knowledge of words and Wordle allows me to notch it up a bit for them. Because this program allows a copy and paste feature, I can quickly determine if my students are using the Wordle words I have assigned for them to include in a book report, essay, or analysis of a poem for example. The most fun use was to have them write their own poetry and use Wordle with their classmates to analyze each other's work. Again it is free and no need to sign up!

Using Wordie with students learning English as a second language is a great time saver. First of all its a great way to get students to learn vocabulary and spelling. It intrigues them because it something they are simple not used to. With younger children they can simply type in words that they are learning (a fun process in itself) and randomize the output.

With teenagers, I found that inputing the lyrics of their favorite song will quite oftenly produce more lyrics. I have also asked students to rewrite a piece of text with the words from the cloud. It was very helpful.

The best thing about using Wordle is the fact that you don't need to sign up or provide an email, which makes it safe to use.

If you have a bit of extra time, or a quick learner who is getting bored, Wordle is a great idea.

Wordle is a tool that makes an illustration, or "word cloud", out of any text. You can type in text into Wordle, or you can copy and paste it in, which is much faster.

I use Wordle in my second grade class to make illustrations out of our spelling words. I ask my students to type their spelling words into Wordle using the classroom computer rather than copying and pasting because they will learn them this way. My students love the end result, and we are able to make a class collage of spelling words!

Wordle is a creative way to help students in noticing how redundant they are using in their word choice. The program allows users to copy/paste text into the web site. After that, an image is generated based on the words contained in the passage. Words that are used the most frequently are larger than those that appear less frequently. As an English teacher, I like this program because it allows students to revise their word choice, based on their findings.

My students have used Wordle to create visual book reports. I required that the students included certain words that reflected not only the characters, author, and title, but also theme, setting, mood etc. My students and I did encounter some technical difficulities, but we were able to troubleshoot with the help of our IT faculty member. My students needed to make sure that they had the most recent version of Java for the program to work. In the end, the final projects were great, and we were able to post them on our classroom website.

I use Wordle to illustrate my vocabulary exercises. By running an essay through Wordle, I generate a word cloud of the terms my students will be learning. This gives them an idea of the new vocabulary they will be learning. After the exercise, we revisit the Wordle cloud and go over each of the new terms they learned.

Wordle is an excellent alternative formative assessment tool. The interface is a bit clunky, but the end product is cool and can be insightful when you have a group of students writing about the same topic. For example, I want to know how kids think we get the seasons. I ask them each to write a paragraph and then I pump a few of them into wordle. The frequency of keywords is translated into size and color. The words 'close' and 'sun' appear the largest. This give me a clue about the misconception I need to address.