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.)
