Monday, February 14, 2011

Oh My Wordle!

Today we learned about Wordle! Basically Wordle is a web 2.0 tool that can be used to create word clouds that you can apply in many different ways to your classroom. It is most certainly a unique and fun tool, very creative and perfect for adding color and design to any syllabus, worksheet, or learning experience. Unfortunately, one thing about the tool is flawed: once you have entered in your text and created the word cloud, you cannot go back and edit the words.Take, for instance, my "about me" word cloud:

 

So as you can see, I intended to emphasize my name and my boyfriend's name. However, I obviously would have liked my name to appear larger than his since this is an "about me" word cloud. I thought leaving it this way would give a visual representation of what I disliked about the tool: the inability to edit without starting over. I do not, however, want to take away from how neat and fun this tool is overall. Next time, I will simply count the words that I want emphasis on before creating the cloud. This way the word I want to be the largest will be listed the greater amount of times. It's as simple as that!

I think using this tool for "about me" assignments could be very fun for the younger, less technologically involved students. Using this tool is very basic and no registration is required. Most importantly, you can personalize the text, colors, fonts, etc!

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