What's a Wordle?

Words in a Cloud by: Samantha Morra

This article is all about wordles. A wordle is a group of words that are put together to look like a cloud. The text that you put into the wordle is then calculated and the words that appear more in the text are bigger inside the wordle so you can see what words were used the most. You can also change the style of the wordle by using different colors of fonts to make it look more interesting. The teacher that wrote the article talks about using wordles in her classroom to show what different types of text were about without even having to read them. She used it for the Declaration of Independence and her students saw what words were frequently used. I thought this article was really cool because anybody could use it and I think everyone would enjoy using a wordle. The author also talked about letting her students use wordles when they wrote papers. They would create a wordle based on their papers and then use the wordle as their cover page to show people what their paper would be about by displaying the different words. I enjoyed this article so much that I decided to make one myself. I found out that you can type in your own text or use text from a url such as a blog! I made a few and it's a really cool technological tool!

I think that these ideas could definitely be incorporated into my future classroom. Just like how the author was explaining how she uses it in her classroom, I would want to do the same thing. When I have to teach a lesson that may seem boring or uninteresting, I could put that lecture into a wordle to show the students the basic themes or topics that would be presented and then maybe go from there. I would also want my students to use wordles in their own homework or in their papers to help them keep interested in whatever they were doing. Doing a wordle is such an easy thing for anybody to do and it's so fun that it can make any lesson so much better, and it's so simple!