Wordle

﻿ Written by Cara Rhyne [|www.wordle.net]

What is Wordle? ﻿ "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 the Wordle gallery to share with your friends."  How can I incorporate Wordle into my classroom? Wordle can be used as a resource for any age and any subject area. Teachers are able to paste "a bunch of text" into the website and use the cluster of words in future lessons. After pasting the text, the user is able to manipulate the look of the word cloud to better suit their lesson. Here are examples of how different core area teachers may use Wordle in a lesson:

Math: The teacher could have a "word wall" or "word cloud" of specific terms they will be using for each unit. For example, in the geometry unit, students are expected to recognize and understand MANY words. Having these words in one list and understanding how they are related may help with overall comprehension.

__**Social Studies**__: The teacher could use this program in order to show importance of historical documents. The more times a word is used, the larger the word will appear in the Wordle cloud. For example, a teacher may copy in the Declaration of Independence or a Presidential speech. The largest words occur most often in the document.

 __**﻿ **____**<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 160%;">Science **__<span style="color: #00a0ff; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 160%;"> - This is another subject area where vocabulary is important. A science teacher could create a Wordle Wall in their classroom; they could type in all of the vocabulary words from each chapter/unit and keep them displayed as the school year progresses. Students would be able to see all of the words they have learned during the school year and see how the same vocabulary words overlap into multiple chapters.

__**<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 160%;">Communication Arts **__<span style="color: #00a0ff; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 160%;"> - Wordle is a program that would be very easy to incorporate into a Comm Arts classroom. One suggestion is to use Wordle when reading a novel to show a main idea of a chapter. By pasting in an entire chapter at a time, the words that occur most often will appear the largest. This will most likely be a main character or main idea. Below is Chapter 1 from Harper Lee's __To Kill a Mockingbird.__