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| Wordle created by Terry Freeman's Article "Five Reasons to Use Wordle in the Classroom" |
Wordle is a tool that allows you to copy text – whether by you or your students -- and then generates a “word cloud” summary from those words. The word cloud gives greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. Once the word cloud has been generated, you can change the font, change the layout, and change the color scheme. Wordle also provides an embed code if you want to paste it into your Blackboard class, or a blog, wiki, etc.
Terry Freedman has written an article– "Five Reasons to Use Wordle in the Classroom" at http://techlearning.com/article/Blogs/20322 - which outlines various ways educators can use Wordle.
Summarizing Mr. Freedman’s article on the 5 ways:
- Summarizing the content of an essay or any piece of work. Useful way of telling people what the essay is about.
- Wordle can be used by the teacher as a means of assessment. Student creates a Wordle of their presentation and uses that as the basis for a discussion.
- Self Reflection.
- Summarizing survey results from text fields.
- Illustrate a student’s writing with a picture.
How Can I Get Started Using Wordle?
- Write your text.
- Select the text and then copy it to the clipboard – Edit/Copy or CTRL/C.
- Go to Wordle’s web site: http://wordle.net.
- Click on Create your Own.
- Paste the text – Edit/Paste or CTRL/V.
- Click Randomize to generate a different “look” to your Wordle.
Once you have created your Wordle, you can print it out. If you want to save, you can use your computer’s screen capture (Print Screen) to copy into a word processing program or presentation program such as PowerPoint, SlideShare, or Prezi. To save as an image, copy the screen capture
to software program such as Paint or Photoshop to save as a graphic. Another option is to save the Wordle in the public gallery and use the embed code to show in your blog, wiki, or web page.
For frequently asked questions: http://wordle.net/faq
