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This video was produced as a contribution to the EDUCAUSE book, The Tower and the Cloud: Higher Education in the Age of Cloud Computing, edited by Richard Katz and available as an e-Book at

I came across Wordle some time ago, thought it was pretty nifty, and then forgot about it. An article in the August 2009 issue of Learning & Leading with Technology ("Words in a Cloud" by Samantha Morra) made me reflect on the power of this fun tool. In the article, Morra describes using Wordle with her middle school students to visually analyze important documents, such as the Declaration of Independence. I began thinking about science and math class and wondered if the tool might help students identify the main concepts of a passage. However, I don't have access to any middle school textbooks to test this out!

If you want to use it as a pre-reading activity, copy and paste your text (or type a few paragraphs) into wordle to create the word cloud. The size of the words indicates the frequency of their use in the text. In essence, major concepts/terms will show up bigger than others. Have students create a prediction about the reading based on what appears in the word cloud.

If you want to use it as a post-reading activity, I have had students keep a running list of words that jump out at them while reading a particular passage (or you can give them a more specific purpose for selecting words). Then, they create their own word clouds. It's a nice formative assessment for teachers to see what students are noticing while reading (or NOT noticing...).

So-called public clouds — shared by a wide range of users, whether consumers or companies — will be “the dominant technology platform for the next 20 years,” Mr. Gens said.

0 percent of new software offerings will be available as cloud services in 2011, according to IDC.

Brainstorming:

The goal is to activate the learners' horizon of expectation, and help learners identify what the text is about

ideally