Fun with Wordle

I took a look at www.wordle.net this week and I love it!  I did have some technical difficulties at first - the version of Java on my computer was too old.  After a quick download, I was good to go and I started making my wordclouds.  Thankfully I did have the Java issue, because wordle directed me to their FAQ page to fix the problem.  On the FAQ page, I read a lot about how the wordles are formed.  I learned that the more times that a word is mentioned within the text on the Create page, the larger the word will appear in the wordle.  I also learned that if you insert a tilde (~) in between two words, wordle will keep those words together and insert a space where the tilde is located.  I also played around a lot with the fonts and shapes.  I started with a random list of biology related words, but then I went to google to find a biology blog and used the url to form this wordle:



I love the 'Owned' font and I used 'wild variation' under the color tab.  It looks like biology graffiti.

Even with the initial Java issue, the website was very user friendly.  I think that this could be usedby children in all grades - it would be a fun site to use for creating report covers or posters.  I can also see using this to create a word cloud to use on t-shirts (for a science club, for example).  It was also fun to see which word showed up the most on the blog that I used and that was easy to do by looking at the size of the words in the final wordle.  I am not sure that creating a wordle is going to help the students to learn or practice any particular skills, but it certainly will help to get them interested in the lesson.  That alone can help increase student achievement.

In trying to think about how this could be used in the classroom, I thought of one example that might be a fun experiment.  In another class I am taking this semester, the professor asked all of us to jot down three characteristics of an effective teacher.  If we all individually entered our answers into the wordle create page, the resulting word cloud would clearly show which characteristics were the most common between our lists.  I think that wordle could be used in classrooms in this way and it might be an eye-opening experience for the students.