A Word About Wordles

I just showed my sister wordle.net. She loved it and is excited to frame her first worlde to decorate her daughter’s new room. Then she asked me how I use wordle.

Hmmm… although I love worlde and I have played with wordle, I have never used worlde in my classroom. I began to think about how I can use wordle in my classroom and ideas that other teachers have shared with me.

For those of you who have never heard of wordle. It’s a simple website that allows you to enter a series words. Then the stie organizes your words into a unique, colorful word splash. If you don’t like the layout of your wordle simply click the randomize button, and the site creates a new one. The more times you enter a specific word, the larger it appears in your wordle.

Through ChrisLAtkinson,who is part of my twitter network, I found a great blog called the wordle blog. It’s written by Jonathan Feinberg, the creator of worlde. One of his posts explains how to use wordle safely in your classroom. (Sometimes inappropriate wordles pop up in the gallery.) In other posts, he describes some unique uses of worlde. For example, he used it to compare inaugural addresses. It was interesting to see which buzzwords remain popular over the years.

This reminded me of a suggestion I heard from another teacher at the BLC Conference. She uses wordle when teaching students about overusing words in their writing. She simply copies and pastes a student’s composition into wordle. The student can clearly see that some words are larger than others, which means that the writer used them over and over, and over again. Wordle gives the students a nice visual and teaches them about overused words in a fun way.

I’ve heard of teachers using wordles to kick of a lesson or build background knowledge before reading a text. I was thinking about using wordle in the beginning of the year. I might have my students interview their classmates and then create a wordle about them. What are some ways you use wordle in your classroom or your own life?

The image was created on wordle.net