Mallory Burton's List: Ideas for Using Wordle

Great CC presentation on practical ways to use Wordle.

A couple of months ago, my network of teachers went a little bit nuts over a new web2.0 application called Wordle. I blogged about it, as did many others.

This group posts Wordles made from song lyrics and invites you to guess the song titles. I'm obviously way too old for this particular version of the game, but it does suggest lots of educational ideas....guess who the student is, or the character from a novel, or which animal the wordle is about.

Great ideas in the post and also in the comments. Love the greeting cards idea; in the classroom that would be great for mother's/father's day or holidays.

7 practical ideas for using Wordle with ESL and EFL students.

Ideas for importing text to wordle and using that text in a lesson where students examine the vocabulary to discover the "gist" of an article or poem.

Idea posted to a blog about using Wordle for getting the gist of a weather forecast. The author has taken the words from a weather forecast and asks the students why they think certain words are larger than others.

A teacher assigned her students the task of creating Wordles using the key words they needed to review for a test.

June 20, 2008 post. Several ideas for using wordle. Students create wordles about themselves listing their name and characteristics, hobbies, etc. Students create wordles describing a character in a novel for a character study. It would be fun to create these without the names and then have students guess who the wordle refers to.

October 2, 2008 post. Detailed description (and video) of a vocabulary game using wordle word clouds. The blogger had created a wordle with vocab from the novel Holes and covered up the words with with rectangles. Students came to the SMARTBoard one at a time to touch the rectangle and reveal a word. Then they used a spinner to tell them what to do with the word: to use the word in a sentence, tell how many syllables, or give a synonym or antonym. The rectangles were colour coded by degree of difficulty so the teacher could differentiate instruction. You can download the Notebook file, and the blogger promises a tutorial for this idea.

This is a toy for generating colourful and interesting word clouds from text. This text can be typed, copied and pasted from another source, or imported directly from a blog url or rss feed. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, colours, and layouts. Take a screen shot to save your creation as there isn't a way to export as a jpeg. Wordles would make great title pages or slides and could be a fun class brainstorming activity or a way for kids to practice writing their spelling words. Kids could create a wordle of adjectives to describe themselves or a character in a novel. They could also be used to analyze student writing for repetitious words or to get the gist of an article. See my wordle tag or WebSlide list of sites with ideas for using Wordle in the classroom.