Great Beginning of School Year Project
August 29, 2008 by jzcolby
Discovered this site the other day and thought — wouldn’t this be great for students to use the beginning of the school year?
Wordle is a tool that looks at the text you provide (students can type in words that describe themselves; words that describe their choice for presidential candidate; words that describe what they want to learn about this school year; words that describe a time in history they are learning about; their vocabulary words they are having a difficult time with; words that describe a country they are learning about, and on and on) and generates a “word cloud” from those words. The word cloud gives greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can change the font, change the layout, and change the color scheme. Once you have created your “word cloud” the students can take a screenshot to save and paste into an application or save to Paint/Photoshop to then save as a jpg image to use in a project — PowerPoint, Slideshare, PhotoStory, Blog, Wiki, etc. Or, they can choose to print it out and make a bulletin board in the classroom of the words. So many uses for this very easy tool. Caution: The Wordle Gallery — if they browse through the Wordle Gallery, could be inappropriate content; but they don’t have to browse to create.
For frequently asked questions: http://wordle.net/faq
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One idea I had when I saw this was to enter the Preamble to the Constitution, for Constitution Day, which I believe is September 17.
Quintura Kids is a kids’ search engine that uses these word clouds. http://kids.quintura.com/ or the adult version at http://quintura.com/
Great idea Elaine about the Constitution. Yes, it is 9/17. Let me know if you do it — be interested to hear how it goes.
I have been looking for a unique “ice-breaker” activity that involved the use of technology. This is it! My new, first, and easy assignment of the year will be for my students to create a Wordle that uniquely describes them and have them introduce themselves using the Wordle. Awesome!