Wordle

What is Wordle?
Wordle is a word cloud making tool created by Jonathan Feinberg. It makes pictures of words according to your needs.

How it works?
You may go to the free website, Wordle and make a word cloud in just a minute. You can type a text and generate a word cloud. The more frequent the words appear in the text, the more prominent they become in the Wordle. You can delete words that you don't want to focus on. You can also choose the colour combination and the ways that the words are arranged.

Benefits
- Word clouds are more attractive than merely words.
- The tool is easy to use and free.

Limitations
- You may need to amend your java settings to operate Wordle.
- The image itself does not have any educational potential. It is all about how you use the image.

Some ideas to use Wordle
1. I've used it a lot when I was teaching in Hong Kong. As a teacher, using Wordle can show the key words in a text. Some vocabulary can be emphasized and shown to students. The Wordle created can also be used as the pre-reading activity to get students think about the theme of the text, or predict what is going to happen next in the story. Students can also use Wordle in the same way to find the key words of a text on their own and know what the text is about. They can compare two texts in terms of the theme and probably the complexity of the language as well.

2. I talked about VoiceThread in one of my previous posts and one teacher used Wordle in her VoiceThread as hints for sentence making activity. You can put the key structures or vocabulary and create a Wordle for students to make sentences. This is more visually appealing compared to a list of key words and lines.

3. I also used it when I was doing presentation in staff meetings. In the school that I worked at, teachers would go to different professional development training and share with the team on what they have learnt afterwards. I find Wordle a useful way to summarize some points of the workshops before moving on to discuss them in details.

To Find out More
My friend Cliff has also talked about Wordle and I do agree that it gives only limited affordance! Cliff's idea about Haiku looks interesting, too. I know very little about Haiku but I'll find out more about it! He also mentioned Greg in his blog as Greg has come up with 35 ideas of using Wordle! I'm really amazed! I could never think of so many ways. Yet, I'm afraid I would do some of the activities using other ways, or simply pen and paper, as Wordle may not be the most effective and economical.
If you are interested in Wordle, you may find Wordsift useful too. They share some similar features but I personally think Wordsift has more functions. Cliff has blogged about Wordsift and I'm sure you'll enjoy his blog as I did!