Wordle

In Creating Word Clouds with Wordle (updated) from On an e-Journey with Generation Y, murcha talks about how she uses Wordle with her classes.

One of my favorite sites to use at the beginning of the year is Wordle. I think it would be good to do this at least once a week and let students see the results. One answers with the most frequency will show up bigger in the word cloud. If you use more than one word, don’t add spaces or they will be separate entries.

“Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to your own desktop to use as you wish.”

The only thing I don’t like is that it won’t work on Chrome because it uses Java. So I use Safari when  I want to make a Wordle.

Here are some suggestions for making a word cloud:

(Many of these can be submitted on an anonymous post-it-note)

• Student first names
• Student middle names
• Student hobbies  
• Things students would like to learn about 
• Student strengths – what do students think they are good at
• Student weaknesses – what do students think they are not good at.
• What quality makes a good teacher?
• What quality makes a good student?
• The biggest problem at our school
• The best thing about our school
• Hardest subject
• Things that scare me
• A fun thing to do
• My favorite place to relax
• My favorite animal
• Who I go to when I need help 

What other suggestions would make a good word cloud? Please share.