Wordle!

Yesterday I had in-service at my school. Usually in-service days are filled with boring, seemingly pointless meetings. I get stacks and stacks of information that I never use. However, yesterday was different! During one of the sessions we were looking at improving literacy and different, creative ways to get our students interested in vocabulary.

One of the sites that they presenter shared was Wordle. I was blown away by this site! Basically you take a list of words, an article, anything you want and paste it into the box provided. When you click ‘create’ it generates a graphic of words. The words are sized according to their significance or the number of times they were used. Once your graphic is generated you can change the font, the color scheme, the direction of the words, etc.

I think this is a great tool to use with students when looking at an article. It can help show them what the main topics are. I also think it’s cool to use with the Scriptures. You can copy and past a set of verses or chapter from the Bible and see what words pop out.

However, the coolest feature is that you can type in the URL of any blog, blog feed, or any other web page that has an Atom or RSS feed ! It then generates a wordle for that site. (The one at the top of this post is from my blog. Click on it to make it bigger.) I had a lot of fun typing in different blogs I read and looking at their wordles.

I thought this was too cool not to share and I can’t wait to hear what you think of the site! Have any of you checked it out before? If so, why did you use it? If you haven’t checked it out yet, please do! I would love to hear your thoughts on other uses.