Wonderful World of Wordles

Have you ever heard of “word clouds?” Wordle is one of many free online programs that allows the user to generate "word clouds." The original Wordle program allows you to input your own list of words or copy and paste from a document/website in order to see a graphical representation of word frequency.  Wordle gives greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in your text, making them appear bigger. You can personalize your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. Some of my favorite "word cloud" generating programs are: tagxedo, ABCya word clouds, and VocabGrabber.

Ways Teachers Use Wordle in The Classroom

1. Summarize a Text-Copy and paste an article into Wordle and the words that are used most frequently will appear larger. These highlighted words aid students in identifying the main ideas and important concepts of the text.
2. Character Traits-You can use Wordle for a unit on character analysis to increase reading comprehension through Character Trait Identification. Write 5 most identifiable and important character traits for any character in the text(assign different characters if done in Reading Group). If you want the trait that best describes the character to stand out you would type it in multiple times.
3. Create a Wordle Gift-Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Grandparent’s Day, or even students' birthdays, can all be celebrated with Wordle. Simply, input your favorite adjectives for your chosen person, generate the word cloud, and it can be added to a greeting card, poster, calendar, or whatever else you choose.
4. Unit Review/Preview Posters-Students can create KWL charts on what they would like to learn and find out about a given topic. Alternatively, create word clouds at the end of a unit to summarize the key learning points or vocabulary from a given topic.
5. Using Wordle for Classroom Polls-Very simple, for example in the beginning of the year you might discuss with students about their favorite sport.    Each child then types their favorite sport into the text part of wordle.   The wordle created automatically shows the most favored color.   Other ideas - birthday month, fav. animals, hardest spelling word, feelings etc.   This type of Wordle could easily be adapted to higher leveled tasks and polls. 

In the beginning of the school year my students created student profile "word clouds" using Tagxedo.  I had all of my students write a few positive adjectives that describe themselves for a beginning of the year get to know you activity. It is a fun way to review what an adjective is and get to know each other. The students then input the adjectives into Tagxedo, and it generates a student profile "word cloud", which then students can choose a shape that will be formed by the words. Check out some of my students Wordles using the Tagxedo program!

Snake

Dog

Joy

Angel

Lightning Bolt