Sunday, September 20, 2009

Word Up to wordle.net

http://www.wordle.net/
Wordle- English notebook cover by Ace Academic!

As I was sitting in my Education 451 class here at NDSU last week, my professor listed off a few websites that might be useful to us as future teachers. She described this website, wordle.net, that can take a list of user-generated words to create colorful word designs like the one above. The way she describe it made it sound pretty lame central. However, today as I was messing around on all things of Google greatness, I saw a picture of an actual wordle. I'm a visual learner, and I found this to be an amazing idea.

My mind started racing on ideas where wordle would work in the classroom. A list of vocab words, the parts of a play or book's setting, descriptions of characters, parts of speech, and the list goes on and on. The most interesting one that came to mind was to use this as a way for my students to introduce themselves to me. Students could bring up the site and start typing in adjectives, activities, or things that describe themselves. Once they've generated their own list of words, they can keep clicking to generate different formats of those words until they find one they like. This would be a great way to get kids, especially freshman, thinking about descriptive language for a possible creative writing unit.

Personally, I'm going to start using wordle to create character descriptions for plays I'll be directing. My actors can also use wordle to show me who they think their characters are. I'm also thinking of using the website for binder covers, notebook covers, and other things.

The powers of wordle are endless.
Check it out and tell me how you might use the site.



http://www.wordle.net/
Wordle- Period G by Meredith


http://www.wordle.net/
Wordle - Storytelling devices by Sylvie

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