WORDLE

the students selected to use the largest words as those they thought were most significant in the life story of Martin Luther King; this is a great way to improve reading comprehension and expand the narrative

here are the teacher's direction for using offline wordles....you should want to know; imo

here are the teacher's direction for using offline wordles....you should want to know; imo

using survey answers from beginning of class in a wordle.

mini icons used in WORDLE

an interesting sidelight on WORDLE

Just for fun -see when, to whom and what time you tweet and then turn it into a cloud or with one click into a Wordle (I didn't save mine; it looked nice but a bit disturbing at the same time...to know that all your tweets can be gathered just like that! Apparently I tweet about teaching, with edchat really big next to the other words :-). You're also told about your twooshes (exactly 140 characters)

another set of icons used on wordle.net

this is the first draft of a wordle used for an image for a blog posting on the topic of links in an article.

first draft

Integrtaion ideas on how to use wordle.net in the classroom.

Download the TextGridLab ZIP file to your harddisk. Unzip the file into any directory. As portable software the TextGridLab will not modify your computer´s operating system; for example, it can also be started from a USB drive.

Wordle created from the text of McCain's concession speech; from a Plurk message that I didn't bookmark.

use this as a compare/contrast of Obama's and McCain's acceptance/concession speech

I totally agree with your comment about WORDLE serving to highlight the commanlities. As an EFL teacher, I tend to focus a lot on the common words in English, as these are the words that define our fluency in the language. I use the BNL2709 vocabulary profiler for this at http://lextutor.ca/vp/bnl -- when you compare McCain and Obama's use of the most common words in their speeches, it can be a good starting point for a compare/contrast analysis which is accessible to most EFL students (well, those above B1 on the CEFR scale). When I get a good result for a WORDLE, I save it to the public gallery. Perhaps interesting to view WORDLEs focusing on the common words in English below with your WORDLE of unfiltered words in the McCain speech in mind. Compare the two WORLDEs http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/289555/Obama_Speech_5-11-08_-_BNL2709 http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/289552/McCain_Speech_5-11-08_-_BNL2709 Notice the differences in frequency of words in both speeches (campaign, bless, nation, unite, promise, achieve, white). Also of note are the words that appear in one and not the other like fail, victory, generation. :) Creating complementary WORDLEs like this can be another useful way to explore the compare/contrast issue that you mention.

I hope that this solution works for the majority of Wordle users. I am, certainly, excited to get back in the classroom and try this out with the kids. I think they are going to LOVE it! Becky

Decades in Review using Wordle concept.