Wordle Words

The focus of the EPCC Faculty Development  blog as determined by Wordle.net

As you may have figured out, I am a computer addict.  Each and every night, I am on the Internet.  I have some sites that I look at every day, such as Facebook and hobby sites, and others that I find through the use of Stumbleupon or blogs.  One interesting site that's popped up from time to time is Wordle.net.  Wordle takes written information and determines the most common words and presents them in a visual format.  It's been around for a couple of years, and is an interesting concept.  The image above was created from the this blog's posts since its beginning.

In addition to being an interesting visual, Wordle does have some applications for the classroom.  Although some of the ideas are for younger students, some can also be used for our college classrooms.  Jonathan Wylie in the article "Top 10 Ways to Use Wordle's Word Clouds for Classroom Lessons," gives examples of the uses of Wordle.  A few of the more useful ideas are summarized below.

Idea 1:  Students can examine historical speeches to see what words are most often used.  It would be interesting to see if there is a change in themes of presidential inaugural speeches from one era to another.  Text can be copied and pasted into Wordle, so there's no need to retype something you can find on the Internet. 

Idea 2:  At the beginning of the semester, many instructors require students to present a short speech about themselves.  If students write a few paragraphs about their interests and then paste it into Wordle, they can then bring their printed word cloud to show what's important in their lives.  By the way, you can save the Wordle word cloud by using the "Print screen" key, pasting it into Photoshop or other photo editing program and then saving it as a jpg.  It's not difficult, but does take a few steps.

Idea 3:  The final idea comes from the edublog article "Ways to Use Wordle."  The author, soulcradler, suggests having students use Wordle to edit their writing.  The student can copy his or her paper into Wordle and then analyze the word cloud to see if there are any overused words or phrases. Soulcradler says, "This might help them avoid cliches and search for new vocabulary to express their ideas."

Wordle is a fun idea, and could bring a change of pace to your classroom. 

See you next week!