Thursday, February 10, 2011

Using Online Word Cloud Generators to Help Students See Inside a Text

Many of you may already know about Wordle, an online word cloud generator, but you might still be wondering how you could use it to help your students learn. This blog post from the UK's Guardian Datablog shows how one person got inside the State of the Union speeches of several different presidents.  One can easily imagine a social studies teacher asking his/her students to compare speeches. But can you imagine an easier, more elegant, or engaging way to do it than what's displayed here? I can already hear lots of interesting ideas filling a room where a teacher posted these examples and simply asked, "What do you notice?" followed by "What do you think that tells us?"

Making a Wordle is pretty easy, but if you want to see how it's done, you can watch this little video demo:

Making a Wordle from 10Tech on Vimeo.

Take a couple minutes to peruse the blog post, then come back and post your ideas here. What two (or more) texts could you "wordlize" for your students? What do you think the impact would be on student understanding of the texts? (Remember, everybody is encouraged to leave their two cents' worth below by posting a comment, but if you want clock hours, make sure you post your name with a (CH) after it.)
Posted by Kimberly Allison at 7:04 AM
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Marie Page (CH)'s avatar

Marie Page (CH) · 736 weeks ago

Okay this is too cool. I will definitely use this Wordle site. I just did to describe my students of the month. It picks out the descriptive words and it makes it so easy to read and remember the words that are important. I can't wait to show my students when we get back on Feb 28th. Cool site!
2 replies · active 726 weeks ago
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Kimberly's avatar

Kimberly · 735 weeks ago

What a great way to honor a student! Did you just do it with the general despciption of students of the month, or did you make a personal one for this month's student that included his/her name? It would be a cool way to present the honor to the student. It's easy to make a custom by "weighting" the words . . . This explains how: http://www.wordle.net/advanced
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Marie Page (CH)'s avatar

Marie Page (CH) · 726 weeks ago

Yes I did and the kids were liked the Wordles we did on them and asked to have them laminated and to keep them. I enjoyed doing them and got a lot of positive comments from all of the students.
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Hilary Hall (CH)'s avatar

Hilary Hall (CH) · 735 weeks ago

I love Marie's idea about the student of the month- what a great way to show personalities of special students! My colleague (Nathalie @ THS) used wordle with a vocabulary list- it jumbled all of the words, with the articles being really big- I asked the students, based on the size of the articles, which were most prevalent- used the size/frequency to make educated guesses about which article is used for which noun.

I was also thinking you could use it with song lyrics- to find themes, important words, etc.

I have a LOT of students who are really visual learners, and they seemed to like the way words were mixed up.
1 reply · active less than 1 minute ago
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Kimberly's avatar

Kimberly · 735 weeks ago

Great ideas, Hilary. I really think it can bring a text to life and makes finding patterns, repatition, etc. much easier because you can see the text as a whole rather than as a linear thing.
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Ben Todd (CH)'s avatar

Ben Todd (CH) · 735 weeks ago

Just spoke with my social studies teaching partners about this. We are currently working on our American Revolution unit. A wordle would be a pretty easy way for kids to organize information they have obtained about loyalists and patriots. This could also be useful when trying to get kids to determine the main idea of a piece of text. Instead of highlighting key words and phrases they simply make one of these. This could also be used if kids are reading different non fiction text and were asked to share with others. You could ask them to look at another student's wordle and attempt to find the main idea of the reading.
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Kimberly's avatar

Kimberly · 735 weeks ago

You could also create a wordle for partiots and one for loyalists that just include words assoicated (and weighted appropriately) for each faction--then show them to kids as a check for understanding or as a test question: Hey kids, which wordle represents which patriots, which one represents loyalists? How do you know.

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