Week 2 - Wordle Ideas

Posts in the table below are from participants in the teacher version of this course. You will review the posts but not contribute to this page.

Following are the instructions provided for the participants who contributed to the content in the table...

After you have experienced creating a WORDLE, post a comment about anything you have observed about Wordle or your ideas for how you might use it instructionally. See the examples provided below. When you are ready to post your thoughts about Wordle, remember to click on the EDIT tab at the top right, then click in the next available row in the table to type your name and your one sentence idea or thought about Wordle.

Participant Name	Ideas about using a Web 2.0 Technology like Wordle
Sample Participant	I like the way words that I have used more than once appear larger since it helps me get a visual of the "big ideas" in my writing.
Sample Participant	Paste in the content of a famous speech and see if students know the speech, study the words used most frequently, is that why the speech was famous?
Sample Participant	This reminds me of something I used to do to my locker in high school. I'd cut words out of magazines to make a collage for the inside of my locker. Those collages spoke volumes about me. This is a neat way to creatively present thoughts.
Sample Participant	This would be a great tool for revising word choice. Students would be able to very quickly see if they have overused any adjectives- a visual representation of which words should be replaced with more vivid choices.
Sample Participant	This would be a great tool to teach persuasion through advertising. Today my students wrote about 2 items that they would be willing to get rid of at their own garage sale. They tried to persuade their audience to buy these items. Using WORDLE would let the words speak for themselves.
Sample Participant	Great tool to highlight the important concepts of any topic. We could create one with the students about our classroom and display it on our classroom portal. It could be an intriguing way to start a unit. Show them the wordle and then ask them to figure out what the main topic is.
Sample Participant	I have used Wordle quite a bit. We started our Outsiders unit by putting Frost's poem, "Nothing Gold Can Stay," into a Wordle. I displayed it in my classroom from the beginning of the unit. Students began seeing it and commenting on it. As soon as we read the poem in S.E. Hinton's novel, the students almost simultaneously stated, "hey, that's his poem!" It was neat to see them figure out their environment is more than what the eyes see sometimes.
Sample Participant	I am planning on having a class blog again next year with my students. At the start of my Pythagorean Theorem unit, the students will write everyt hing they knew about the Pythagorean Theorem on the class blog, of which we turn all their comments into a wordle. At the end, I will have them do the same thing, and I will create another wordle. We will then compare the two wordles. I would hope that the things emphasized in the unit would be LARGE.
Sample Participant	The two ways I would use Wordle would be to help brainstorm ideas and to help students build vocabulary word choices. This is a great program to kick start student creativity and making them aware of what they choose to write.
Sample Participant	At the end of the unit have students type in their own set of words (the ones that are more important are typed more often). These can be printed and posted in the classroom. It is interesting to see how students think about the vocabulary.