Since Wordle was introduced in 2008, there has been no shortage of educational uses of creating word clouds. Below is a list of recent and popular blogs that have published their favorite uses of Wordle in the classroom. If you are new to Wordle, refer to the section below "What is Wordle?" and the useful frequently asked questions page maintained by creator Jonathan Feinberg.
- ProfHacker published an article on Using Wordle in the classroom to analyze poetic diction.
- The SlideShare slideshow Forty-Three Interesting Ways to use Wordle in the Classroom includes a wealth of ideas for teaching. One of my favorites is Guess the French fairytale.
- Rodd Lucier summarizes a few of his clever ideas in the Top 20 Uses for Wordle, including condensing survey response data into a word cloud.
- Jennifer Wagner hosts a Monday-Friday Daily Guess the Wordle.
- Bill Wolff's Teaching Students How to Write Meaningful Tags explains strategies that help students break down blog posts to write more descriptive tags.
- Jamie Keddie describes A Really Useful Wordle Trick on how to include phrases such as "once a upon a time".
- Author Scott Westerfeld's interesting blog on eliminating overused words includes a word cloud of his novel Leviathan after the first draft.
- Wordle creator Feinberg uses statistical analysis to generate word cloud visualizations comparing Presidential Inaugural Addresses.
- Keri-Lee Beasley describes a simple but clever use of Wordle in first-grade poetry writing with a summary of what students learned.
- I published a post on Wordling Conference and Chat Tweets.
Wordle Nonsense
Despite many possible educational uses, it is still important to ask why Wordle should be used in the classroom and what are the expected goals for students. Without carefully defining these expectations, Wordle can end up being a new technology toy, resulting in generating nonsensical data without a purpose. What better way to demonstrate Wordle nonsense than creating a word cloud of a passage generated with a Lorem Ipsum generator as shown below?!
Created with Wordle.net
What is Wordle?
With Wordle you can easily create a visual word-frequency cloud of any copied text, blog site, or tags from a Delicious site. In a matter of seconds your beautiful graph can provide information that is educational or useless, but regardless of the result it is fun and quite stunning to look at. Below is a Wordle of President Obama's speech on racism.
Created with http://wordle.net
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