I have never seen anything like Wordle before! It amazes me how I can type random words into the box, push go, and it automatically organizes them into attractive looking designs. I especially like the randomize tool on Wordle. Every time I click, it reorganizes the words to make a new design with different fonts and colors. Another feature of Wordle that I found interesting was how I can copy and paste full articles or poems into the text box. Wordle leaves out the meaningless words to make an interesting design. As I was watching the "Introduction to Using Wordle" and "Extending Wordle a Bit More" Tutorials I discovered how to put in the URL to a blog or any type of news feed. Wordle then searches through and isolates important words to organize them into an artistic composition. This is a great way to figure out some of the main topics of a news sight or blog without having to search through it too much.
As I was playing around with this application I started thinking about how I would use it in a classroom setting. I think Wordle could be used with all grade levels of students. For younger elementary students I could use it as a culminating experience to sum up a book that we have been reading. I could ask the students to come up with words that described the main ideas in the story. They could recall the setting, any problems, characters, climax, ect. As they list these words I could put them into Wordle. If I have a SMARTboard in my room, they could help me decide on the layout, font, and color scheme. After the class has chosen the final Wordle, we could print it out and hang it in our classroom or on a bulletin board for others to see what books we have read.
An idea for upper elementary or early middle school students is to have them make a Wordle for every book they read throughout the school year. This could be a type of short book report project for each book. I could have a bulletin board in my classroom called “Reading Wall” that students could hang their book report Wordles on. Eventually this bulletin board would include many books of all different genres. When students don’t know what kind of book they want to read next they could refer to the “Reading Wall” for suggestions from other classmates.
A final idea for upper middle school or high school students could involve history. As we talk about certain topics in history like different wars or civil rights, they could make Wordles to sum up important ideas from each incident. In this case the Wordles could almost be used as an assessment tool for me as a teacher. I could measure how much students understand or have learned by what words they put in their Wordles.
I think this took and other like it could really liven up classroom instruction. Students like fun tools like this one. Using Wordle in my future classroom could even help a student that is unmotivated to get excited about learning again!
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