Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Blog Post 10 - Wordle

One of the most interesting things I learned in this class was the program Wordle. Wordle is a program in which one copies and pastes any amount of text and a word picture is generated. The words which appear most frequently are larger and more bold, while the words that are used less are smaller. After researching more about Wordle, I discovered that the program will automatically eliminate common words such as "a" and "the." Also, Wordle differentiates the same word with different letter cases as different words, which could be an inconvenience. Wordle allows the user to change the style, font, and colors of the word picture, so it can be more personalized.

I think Wordle has extremely large potential within the field of education. Children in general are very visual, and seeing a word picture could help them understand ideas or concepts. Also, Wordle could be useful in helping to introduce a lesson, because the teacher could discuss most important topics first, and then continue on with other aspects of the lesson. Moreover, Wordle could be very useful to do an activity such as the one done during class, in which the instructor takes papers written by students and puts them all into one word picture, so the students can see which ideas and themes they collectively wrote most about.


By searching google for "Wordle," I was able to find an entire slideshow on uses of Wordle for education. This is extremely useful, and it is something I will look at again because some of the ideas are very good tools for teaching.

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