BP14_2009103_Web2.0Tools_MyComment

Sunday, October 18, 2009
BP11_2009103_Web 2.0 Wordle
Wordle (wordle.net) is a fun and unique Web 2.0 site that has recently become very popular in my school district. Wordle is different from most of the other Web 2.0 tools that we’ve been looking at over the past few months, as it isn’t really a network or a forum or a platform designed primarily for publishing content.


According to the homepage, “Wordle is a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide.” (Feinberg, 2009, para. 1). The concept is incredibly simple. Users type or copy text into a box on the site, and Wordle analyzes the text and creates a graphic word cloud from the text. Words that are used more frequently in the text appear larger in the word cloud. Once the word cloud is generated, the user can change different parameters of the appearance, including the color scheme, the font, the way the words are laid out on the page, and other settings based on the language of the source text.


There is a minor issue that affects printing in Mac OSX, which is easily remedied by installing a Java applet from the FAQ page of the Wordle site.


Wordle provides several interesting educational uses. It provides an interesting way to analyze text, especially the relative frequency of use of words in a given source text. An example on the Wordle site shows a comparative analysis of inaugural addresses by every president. My Studio Tech students are currently working on a project called the “Poetry Remix Project” in which they record themselves reciting a poem, then edit and remix the lyrics into a new poem. They’re using Wordle to provide inspiration for how to remix their poem lyrics, and they’re also using the word cloud images created from their poems as background images for their project page in their digital portfolios.


The Wordle image below was created from the poem “Charlie Parker played be bop” which I use as an example in my introduction of the poetry remix project.


References:

Feinberg, J. (2009). Wordle - beautiful word clouds. Retrieved October 18, 2009 from http://www.wordle.net/


Raschka, C. (1997). Charlie Parker played be bop. New York: Orchard Books.
Posted by Eric Anderson at 4:22 PM
1 comments:

Ali Baxendale said...

Eric,
This website could be very helpful in my classroom. We do different readings in Spanish. For Spanish 1 and 2 students, this can be very overwhelming. I can use Wordle as a prereading activity for them. they can look at the finished Wordle document before they read the text to see if there are any words they need to look up. This will also give them more confidence in the reading since the largest words will be the ones they already know. This is also a great activity to have the students do on their own after they read an article. Thanks for sharing!
October 18, 2009 6:39 PM