Comments on: Exploring, Learning and Communicating with Wordle

By: Rachael

Rachael — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 07:45:38 +0000

I love learning and I love that you said learning is is about exploration, discovery, play, and surprise. I truly believe that learning is all those things. It can be so fun. Growing, schools was a chore, but I feel like with my kids, I am making it an adventure.

We just started spanish (preschooler age) with this great bilingual book that is in both english and mexican spanish. Really cute. Anyway, whoever can use the most spanish words in a day that we learned, gets to pick the books to read that night. It is a lot of fun and they are loving it.

side note: It is a really cute book – “Tim and Kim” by Kay Linda Nord. Nord grew up in a bilingual home and wrote this for her son. Great personal story and children’s book. If interesed, this is where I found it: http://kaylindanord.com/

Thanks for the post on Wordle!

By: cmitton

cmitton — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 04:09:55 +0000

I’ve used Wordle as reading tool ever since I read a post on Box of Tricks about it. Before reading an article, I copy the text into Wordle, create a word cloud, and then have the students predict what they think the article will be about. After we read the article, we reflect on our original predictions and make revisions as necessary. Sometimes as an alternative, we’ll make our own Wordles after reading a story. For that activity, the students have to decide what they feel are the most important ideas, words, and phrases from the story in order to make a Wordle. It’s a great way (and fun!) way to teach main ideas and supporting details—in a way that feels like play! I’m excited to try using Wordle as a tool to analyze their writing. Will it pick up on their overuse of a specific word (“then,” for example) or would common, high frequency words be filtered out of the word cloud?

By: Mom

Mom — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 18:53:50 +0000

So fun! Thanks!

By: Ingrid

Ingrid — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 14:42:08 +0000

I’ve actually used Wordle to create signs for my office at the middle school and high school using words to describe my position as instructional technology specialist. Great post!

By: Gary

Gary — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 04:51:44 +0000

My tech kids had fun with wordle. They used it to examine some writing they had done for socials class and used the word cloud to look at word choice. Students then modified the text, changing the more frequently occurring words, and created a second wordle cloud. The resulting text was then placed within a glogster poster. Worked quite well.

By: Wordle « Sail’s Pedagogy

Wordle « Sail’s Pedagogy — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 01:33:15 +0000

[...] Exploring, Learning and Communicating with Wordle [...]

By: Martin Jorgensen

Martin Jorgensen — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 22:16:14 +0000

“The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression. To play is to act out and be willful, exultant and committed as if one is assured of one’s prospects.” –Brian Sutton

Great quote!

By: Laurie Fowler

Laurie Fowler — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 22:03:32 +0000

I really enjoyed this post. I love Wordle and can see lots of ways to use in the classroom even if there may be inappropriate Wordles in the gallery. I like the mixing of literacy and visuals. I also LOVE to play with the Wordle by changing the colors, the horizontal/vertical ratio, and font.

Play is not just for kids according to Dan Pink in A Whole New Mind. A great quote from that book is “The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression. To play is to act out and be willful, exultant and committed as if one is assured of one’s prospects.” –Brian Sutton-Smith professor emeritus of Education at the Univ. of Pennsylvania. Playing with the words in Wordle from speeches, our tag clouds, and just lists of words is a great way to be exultant about vocabulary and words themselves.

Laurie Fowler
Tuscaloosa, AL

PS I am leaving this comment as part of Steve Dembo’s 30 Days to Being a Better Blogger.

By: Jackie Gerstein

Jackie Gerstein — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 17:03:42 +0000

As a teacher of upper elementary gifted students, both my students and I really like wordle – what a great combination of literacy and visual literacy. My students picked topics they wanted to explore, developed a related vocabularies for those topics and produced Wordle’s for their respective Wiki pages – We are also showcasing our work – here is a sample of their content-connected Wordles – http://weewebwonders.synthasite.com/worlde.php

By: Martin Jorgensen

Martin Jorgensen — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 07:22:08 +0000

I love Wordle, I’ve found it’s a wonderful introduction for students to digital story writing. I included it on http://www.thedigitalnarrative.com earlier in the year as an introductory exercise for those teachers wishing to explore digital narrative in the classroom.

http://www.thedigitalnarrative.com/teachign%20method%20lessons/warmups.htm

Using colors and manipulating the direction of your content, you can explore more fluid forms of story writing. Does the color influence the meaning? How do alternate shapes in your Wordle affect your digital narrative.

I’ve also had great success with students building stories using online mindmapping tool bubbl.us. It’s also very suitable site for introducing alternate forms of story writing to a classroom.

http://www.thedigitalnarrative.com/teachign%20method%20lessons/bubblus.htm

With bubbl.us you can explore shapes and colors in much the same way, but with a greater scope I think.

Importantly, there’s not initial need to register for either Wordle, or bubbl.us … which makes them easier to introduce it to the classroom.

Cheers

Martin J