I thought I’d take a minute to mention Wordle. What is it? You’ve probably seen them… it’s an artistic jumble of words that appear in a block of text, with frequently-used words or concepts appearing in larger type. This is a wordle (that I created using their site) of the text of the Declaration of Independence:
Neat? I think so. I can be a bit pessimistic sometimes, so I immediately began asking “…but how would you USE this?!?!” I have been educated, as there are several uses that have been mentioned.
* Use it on your own writing or someone else’s, simply to learn more about your writing style. Do you use certain words often? Perhaps TOO often?
* Paste in a news article or famous text – this would quickly give you an interpretation of the concepts presented in the text. You could ask students to then read the actual article or text. Does the Wordle accurately represent the concepts you took from the article? If so, how so? If not, what did you take from the article?
* Have all students write a few sentences to summarize a chapter of a book. Paste all of the responses into the Wordle and see if the appropriate concepts are highlighted in the Wordle representation of the students’ writings.
Very interesting indeed. I took a couple of these ideas from this blog, which also features many other potential uses for Wordle.
I always thought of it as just a way to make some cool looking graphics. But as a former high school English teacher, I absolutely see how it could be a really useful tool using the methods you presented. Thanks for sharing, Jody!