GEEK BRIEF 012109 - WORDLE

Wordle is a free 'word art' tool that takes a group of words and creates a visual representation. Originally designed as a fun maker of word clouds, Wordle is being used in interesting ways to provide compelling summaries of anything word related.
As the site says, " Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends."
I have used it to create a cloud of our WORDS OF THE DAY for the semester


Following are a few ideas to consider(thanks to Rod Lucifer of the blog "Clever Sheep"):

1] Convert a sonnet or Shakespearean play;
2] Key people in historical events
3] Combine student 'Who Are You?' introductions, to develop a class composite;
4] Condense survey data by dumping content of questionnaire responses into the Wordle engine;
5] A new take on "reflecting" or journaling.
6] Turn an essay into a poster;
7] Automate the creation of word poetry;
8] As an introduction to a unit or course, combine key words; themes; curriculum expectations to provide learners with a visual overview of content;
9] Convert nutritional content of one's weekly diet or of a group's menu preferences
10] Paste the results of a Google search (Can you guess the keywords I used?);
11] Enter keywords from weekly weather reports to obtain a seasonal picture;
12] Distill song lyrics
13] Find out what you've been up to by summarizing To-Do lists;
14] Represent the results of a brainstorming session or the minutes of a meeting visually;
15] Show "This date in History" stories in a new way;

Try it- it really is fun!