Education Rambler

I just stumbled upon an interesting site called Wordle. Wordle’s task is to take a block of text and create a word cloud from it. When I first saw it, I thought “cool,” but didn’t immediately think of an educational application. When I was skimming through the gallery on Wordle, I found a cloud from Romeo and Juliet and it became clear to me that Wordle may have an educational purpose after all.

In examining the Romeo and Juliet word cloud, you can see that all of the key words of the play are emphasized.  My thought about an educational implication is that Wordle may assist students with the idea of determining importance (my colleague, Lesa Dionne, gave me the ELA terminology for this).  If students were to take a block of text, they could type it or paste it into Wordle and immediately get feedback regarding what was most important.  Now–granted–not everything that is “frequent” is important, but in many cases frequency does indicate importance.

Other than the ELA skill implications, Wordle clouds are pleasing to the eye.  Users can manipulate colors, layouts, and fonts.  In speaking with Lesa, we wondered if a Wordle would be an interesting finishing touch to student autobiographies or other pieces of writing.  Students can type in URLs of  web pages, blogs, or wikis to determine the most frequently used words and themes (below is a Wordle of my last blog post about ChaCha).  I think it’s definitely a tool worthy of further investigation.