Wordle

For this assignment we learned to create word clouds using a website called Wordle. One way in which word clouds could be useful is to summarize data as the examples show below. Be sure to click on the images to link to a bigger version.

   

This image is a word cloud of the NETS-T standards of the year 2000. By taking a quick look at this word cloud, you can see the main points of the standards and form a quick understanding as to what they are about. For example, at just a glance you can see a few of the main points of the standards are "technology" and "resources." 

The NETS standards of 2008 are similar to the 2000 standards, but they seem to emphasize creativity and innovative thinking more than the earlier version. Since much of the language is the same in the standards, the word cloud below is very similar to the previous one.




With all of the different layouts and settings to choose from in Wordle, so you can make your word clouds easy to view and fun to create. I played around with the settings and ended up choosing a mixture of both vertical and horizontal layouts to make my word clouds stand out.

I think Wordle would be fun to use in my classroom because I could use it to help students find important parts of a story or text like we did with the NETS standards above. In my example below, I used it for a character analysis of one of the character's in Kurt Vonnegut's short story, "Harrison Bergeron." This activity could be fun for students and they could print them out and keep them to help them remember certain qualities of particular characters in a story we are reading.

 

This activity would touch on many different NETS Standards because I would be incorporating technology into the classroom to enhance student learning and promote innovative thinking. Students would create original summaries of their characters and use technology to turn the summaries into fun word clouds to help with their reading and interpretation of the text.