Technology in the Education Arena » wordle http://jzcolby.edublogs.org My thoughts and ideas on Technology in Education and how we can all benefit from our use of technology in the classroom. Tue, 19 May 2009 12:53:37 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.2 en hourly 1 Note on Wordle http://jzcolby.edublogs.org/2008/08/29/note-on-wordle/ http://jzcolby.edublogs.org/2008/08/29/note-on-wordle/#comments Sat, 30 Aug 2008 00:04:25 +0000 jzcolby http://jzcolby.edublogs.org/?p=154 In my prior post, I wrote about Wordle.  This is a great tool; however, as with anything on the Internet, you need to be aware of the inappropriate content.  There is a Gallery with Worlde that, as mentioned before, can contain inappropriate words.  On the Wordle home page, the latest Wordles created are shown.  To bypass the home page for the students, go to http://wordle.net/create.  This will allow you to go directly to the “Create” page.  It really is worth investigating.  Simple but effective!

]]> http://jzcolby.edublogs.org/2008/08/29/note-on-wordle/feed/ 0 Great Beginning of School Year Project http://jzcolby.edublogs.org/2008/08/29/great-beginning-of-school-year-project/ http://jzcolby.edublogs.org/2008/08/29/great-beginning-of-school-year-project/#comments Fri, 29 Aug 2008 17:14:28 +0000 jzcolby http://jzcolby.edublogs.org/?p=153 Discovered this site the other day and thought — wouldn’t this be great for students to use the beginning of the school year?

http://wordle.net

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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