I'm loving word clouds, but not at all a fan of trying to get a Wordle saved to post here, so I went to Word It Out instead. I spent the day driving through the eastern North Carolina countryside from the coast to Chapel Hill with an unruly 3-year-old. My word cloud is just a list of the towns we drove through today. My brain isn't capable of much more right now. I can envision this being used to really enrich academic language. Kids could generate a list of words having to do with a topic and then have classmates try to guess their topic. There are many, many possibilities. Academic language is such a challenge, and making vocabulary work novel for kids with higher-level thinking is a challenge for educators. Word cloud tools are a fabulous vehicle for that.
I toyed with almost all of the image generators and had a lot of fun. The possibilities are unlimited for classroom use. Kids often need a way to synthesize the vast amount of information they learn. These multiple sources provide so much choice to kids on how they do that.
I like your idea for using WordItOut to create guessing games of a student's main idea. Another interesting application might be to have students copy and paste drafts of their stories into Wordle to identify over-used words such as "then" or "like" as these words would appear larger in their Wordles. Kind of a visual editing tool. You're right - there are so many possibilities.
ReplyDeleteMillie
Ooh! I love the idea of using Wordle to see the overuse of certain words. (I should try that in my own writing sometime.)
ReplyDeleteYounger students could even put a sentence into Wordle and then share their cloud with a partner to see whether the partner could reproduce it. That would be a very cool sentence structure activity.
Contrary to popular belief, I'm really a language arts geek at heart...