I first came across Wordle when I read a book by, an influential British linguist DavidCrystal, called “a Little Book of Language”. It is very useful when it comes to
sifting words according to frequency of usage in a text or that you want to
create an art out of your favourite words. The size of the visualization of a word will be relative to how many times it appears in your text.
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| a word cloud generated Emily Dickinson's poem "Hope is the Thing with Feather" |
Editor's Review
★★★
Acceptable
The good: I always recommend free tools. You can personalise your word cloud from a number of layouts. Your word cloud can be strikingly colourful with Wordle's custom colour for fonts. Talking about the fonts, you can decide the font that you want to use. You can save and print out your word cloud. You can leave out numbers and special characters if you want to create a word cloud from a text. You can view some examples from other users and improve yours. It omits auxiliary verbs. There is word count.
The bad: It does not work with non-Romanized languages like Japanese or Chinese. It requires Java to run. Hence, you need to ensure that your Java is up to date and that your browser allows Java application. It cannot do word stemming.
The bottomline: There is a big discussion going on whether Wordle is better than its contender, Wordsift. Despite all that, my main concern is how will you utilize the tools for teaching and learning. Wordle does have few setbacks but what it can offers to me is parallel to my teaching goals and planned activities. I will recommend Wordle but at the same time, have a look at Wordsift and decide which tool is your cup of tea.
Remember Tony Buzan's breakthrough in mind mapping? Wordle is another example of how words can be manipulated into a powerful mechanism. Anyway, Wordle is not a mind map but it is a tool to create word cloud which shares few similar features with mind map.
How to
1. Start by clicking 'create' button.
2. Get your targeted text and paste in the large box or if the text is a web page or posts, enter the URL instead in the second box. Don't forget to click 'go' for the former and 'submit' for the latter option.
3. Experiment with your ready word cloud and adjust the layout. Customize your word cloud. You can print it out or save it to public gallery.
Suggested Class Activities
Adjectives to describe Someone
There are two ways in which this activity can be carried whether you can do it in pairs or a whole class competition or that the students have to describe someone from their class or a famous person. If you choose to have a pair work activity, students can write down an essay that includes adjectives that are closely describing one of their classmates. Their partner can make a guess based on the word cloud. The larger the size of the visualization of the word, that should be the potent trait of that person. Similarly, the same activity can be done when it comes to describing a famous person. However, as a teacher, you should provide a context or a scope to who can be considered as a famous person. There is a danger that the person a student is describing does not correspond to anyone's believe who is percieved as famous. If you want a pop singer as a famous person, you might likely need to narrow its criteria by specifying the gender or era. Another point to consider when conducting this activity is the possibilities for students to be racist or prejudice. We need to be careful when we are making a remark on someone. We do not want any fight just because someone calls the other girl girlish.
Memory Amplifier
Get students to use word cloud as an aid in memorizing important facts for subjects like History. Since word cloud can be personalized according to our preferrable colour scheme; colours can help in memorization for they are more brain stimulating than plain black and white or monotonous word cloud.
Write a Summary
Start your lesson with a vocabulary pre-reading activity. Students will need to match a set of vocabulary that comes from your reading text and match them with their meanings. How the vocabulary is decided is when you sift the text and turn it into word cloud. Decide your theme or grammar choice whether it is noun or verb or adjective. For the while reading activity, students might need to answer comprehension questions. Finally, for the post reading, using the word cloud students will need to write a summary of the reading test. In order to assess their work, I will still recommend peer feedback activity. It is also suggested for you to try formative assessment when you will provide feedback to their work. You might consider the use of 'success criteria' that you have agreed earlier with your students. Whether you want to give oral or written feedback, direct or indirect feedback as well as interpersonal or intrapersonal feedback.
Creative Writing Competition
Simply ask students to write a fictional story of a something like "When Mr. Boogieman Haunts Mr. Baskerville" as such and observe how students idea might flourish. Later on ask students to transfer their story into word cloud form. Winners are decided by the quality of the story and their word cloud presentation. The verdict is decided by votes. How else can we ever instil democratic element in students? This is to put forward the idea that everyone has their own responsibility in deciding on something and that together can make even the weakest group stronger. Get the best work posted on the walls.
Rationale
Colourful
It creates this atmospheric learning ambience when you have colourful words on papers. Words no longer seems dull and that students can observe many things can be done with words. Not necessarily to describe things but to be put into groups according to its frequency.
Aware
Students can now realise what makes up the most of the essays and texts around the world. Auxiliaries! These auxiliaries are omitted in the word cloud. Hence, they can easily comprehend the main idea underlying each text because a 100 word text can turn long winded just because of petty auxuliaries and insignificant descriptions.
David Crystal
I know this is absolutely absurd but I am rather bias. I am impressed by Crystal's persuasive writing most of the time and the fact that he recommended this tool really heighten up Wordle's value. But like I said, by this time there should be already plenty of other free similar tools that offers the same features like Wordle.
Limited to Romanized Languages Only
It will be great if it is available in other languages like Arabic or Japanese but so much to demand from a free tool.
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