Sunday, July 22, 2012

Wordle: Another Web 2.0 Tool

Wordle is a web-based tool that turns texts into artwork. Wordle takes texts or words you provide  and transforms them into a word "cloud" or image where greater prominence is given to words that appear more frequently. You as the "artist" can then change the font, layout, and color scheme.

Below is a Wordle I made for Lord of the Flies. I input the whole book into the text box and this was my Wordle:

Lord of the Flies in a word cloud

As you can see, the words that appear most in the novel are "Ralph," "Jack", "Piggy." However, some of the other more prevalent words are the different locations on the island, items like the fire and the conch, and then words that appear the least include things like "shelter" and "tribe." When I was first introduced to Wordle by a literacy coach in graduate school, she said often times English teachers can use Wordle as a prereading tool because more often than not, the more prevalent words show what is key or important to the text. This in, in part, true with the LOTF Wordle since the larger symbolic figures are the highlighted words.

Wordle can also be use similarly to look at the key points of speeches, poetry, or student essays. For revisions, students can upload their papers and see which words are repetative. Wordle can also be used to make descriptive blurbs about characters, class rules, or any other literary display.

My issue with Wordle is how limited it is in terms of educational value. After reading a few articles and blogs about it, it seems that Wordle is just a fun after-project when finishing a unit where students write down what they learned and then create word art. In terms of a learning tool, I think Wordle is more restrictive since it only looks for word prevalence. There is not much depth to the tool, it is not interactive, and while it is fun to make word clouds, only so many texts, when inputted, highlight really significant ideas.

5 comments:

  1. Hi Kelsey: I think I agree with you about Wordle's limited educational value. It can be fun to play with a list of vocab. terms, but in the end, it is not helping connect definitions to words or helping with spelling. It is a bit intriguing that you put in a whole novel (Lord of the Flies) and were able to see which words appeared most frequently. It's use for pre reading for word frequency is a good use. To be honest, since I was introduced to Wordle in a PD class, I have used Wordle only a few times, most often to create covers for binders that I keep in my office! There are so many of them and they all look alike so I created some quick Wordle covers to help me to locate them more quickly and differentiate them. Not educational use for sure, more organizational.

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  2. I have used Wordle before to create word clouds about a novel my students just completed reading. I think it is fun and it can create student interest in the words. I agree that there can be limited educational value in it, however it might spark student creativity by the word clouds it creates. For some reason, on my home computer Wordle completely signs me out of my browser! Hopefully this is just a limitation of my own computer and others do not experience this.

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  3. I like your assessment of Wordle. It sounds like it can be a great pre-reading, or even post-reading tool. However, I agree that its educational value is limited. When the push for increased technology first came to my school, this was one of the tools that our administration kept mentioning. They too only had the 1 or 2 suggestions for how to use it, but they were enamored. I feel like it really set the tone that any technology, whether it is helping students learn or not, is needed. That experience had me really down on Wordle, even though I do recognize that it can be a great tool as you described.

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  4. I have been back and forth on how useful sites like Wordle are. I think it could be used to identify themes in literature, which can be a tricky concept at times. This could make that sort of abstract concept a bit more visual, which would definitely help some learners. I do like the idea of students using it to see words that are repeated in a piece of writing. We all know students have "crutch" words they lean on time and again throughout their reading and this would certainly let them see that in a different way!

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  5. thanks for providing this information really it is helpful

    Categories of TOEFL

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