Saturday, July 26, 2008

Visualize Student Writing (or any writing) Artistically Using Wordle!


Wordle is a clever new website (free)that lets you create artistic "word clouds" of any selected text or website. I'm not sure exactly how I'll use it in the ESL classroom but it's a lot of fun and beautiful too! Basically, you paste text or a URL into the site and it creates the word clouds automatically based on the frequency of the words appearing in the selected text. Here's one I made from one of my student's paragraphs.

As I said above, it's very artistic but I'm not sure about it's educational content! Any ideas? Is just doing it and displaying the text sufficient as a classroom activity? Perhaps it's enough to utilize simply as a motivational tool to get students to write something in order for it to be visualized...

Thanks to Sue Waters who mentioned Wordle on her blog Mobile Technology in TAFE.

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