Emerging Technology # 1: Wordle

I chose to research and study Wordle as an emerging technology for this assignment. Before this class, I had never even heard of Wordle. In fact, the primary reason that I chose to explore Wordle in more depth is because I had never used it. In order to get the most out of this class, I wanted to push myself outside of my comfort zone and explore new technologies and ideas.

First, I will begin by explaining what Wordle is. According to the Heartland Area Education Agency's World of Media article/blog (which can be found at http://worldofmedia2007-2008.blogspot.com/2009/11/wordle-word-cloud-creator-k-12.html), Wordle is a program that generates "word clouds" from any text that you manually enter or copy and paste into the entry form. Wordle can also be used to display an individual's del.icio.us tags as well. Furthermore, Wordle can be used to create visual "word clouds" using text from any language. Wordle creations can be printed, shared, or uploaded to online documents such as blogs and websites. In fact, there is even a "gallery" of recently created Wordles that users can see and make use of. Wordle is completely free to use and is fantastic for making creative visual representations of text. I spent a great deal of time on Wordle trying to experiment with layouts, customizing options, colors, text, etc. I found that Wordle was extremely easy to use. The artistic representations of the words that I entered were very effective in creating a visual image that was pleasurable to look at and study. It was amazing to me to see how all of the words that I entered could be arranged in such a fun and creative way. I actually had a lot of fun simply experimenting with the Wordle creator. Here is an example of an actual Wordle that I created myself:


If you want to create your own Wordle, you can access it by going to the following website: www.wordle.net .

While researching the possible uses of this technology in the classroom, I was bombarded with an overwhelming number of innovative ideas for how Wordle could be used for educational purposes. One website that was particularly helpful in helping me think of implementation ideas was www.boxoftricks.net/?p=103. Another website that was useful was: http://www.hyperhomeschool.com/hyperhomeschool_blog/2009/12/27/technology-tools-that-have-enhanced-our-homeschooling.html. Here is a list of only fifteen out of an endless listing of the ideas that I found on the internet for using Wordle in the classroom:
1. Have your students create a Wordle of their favorite song lyrics.
2. Allow your students to write a poem and then share that poem artistically through a Wordle.
3. Have students select their favorite quotes and make Wordles out of them and display them throughout the classroom.
4. As an ice-breaker activity for your class, have the students make a Wordle describing themselves and have them share their Wordle with the class as a way to introduce and express themselves.
5. Have your students create a Wordle that includes all of their spelling words for the week.
6. Have students find key vocabulary words in a Wordle instead of a traditional Word Search.
7. Allow students to use a Wordle as a brainstorming strategy to create an idea map or outline to guide their writing.
8. Create a Wordle that lists several synonyms for the same word. This would be a great way to teach and show students that some words have identical or at least similar definitions and meanings.
9. Have the class work together to create a Wordle that represents all of the members of the class (enter the teacher's name and all of the student's names to represent that the class works as a joint entity and that each person is a vital part of that entity)
10. Creating a Wordle as a class would be a great way to review key terms or main ideas from a chapter in any subject.
11. Creating a Wordle of a famous speech such as Abraham Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" or Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have A Dream Speech" would be a fresh approach to teaching students how to look at main ideas and key words in a speech.
12. Wordles can be used to express an idea in many different languages at the same time. It would be a great way to teach foreign languages or even to teach ESL students new vocabulary words in English.
13. Teachers could use Wordle to help students create appreciation posters or cards for Mothers' Day, Fathers' Day, Birthdays, Grandparents' day, etc.
14. Instead of writing a traditional literary analysis or reflection, students could use Wordle to create a visual representation of how a piece of text made a student feel or to summarize the main points of an article or reading assignment.
15. English teachers could make grammar fun by asking students to type a list of words into Wordle and ask them to make specific parts of speech different colors (e.g. make all adjectives red, all nouns blue, all pronouns purple, all adverbs yellow, etc.) This would be a fun and interactive way for students to apply their knoweldge of basic parts of speech.

Although I said that Wordle was very easy to use, I did experience a few problems while trying to use it. First of all, there is no option to return to the text editing screen after you have created a Wordle. In order to create a new Wordle with additional words, you have to copy the information that you typed in for the first Wordle and paste it into a new creation. I found it particularly frustrating to try to add additional words to my Wordle and found myself having to manually re-type in all of the words that I used until I fugured out the copy and paste method. Another problem that I experienced was that I created a wordle with too many words on it. If you try to input too many words into a single Wordle, the Wordle can appear too busy and crowded and it starts to lose its effectiveness as a teaching tool. After reading the FAQ's section on the Wordle homepage, I was able to discover that it is possible to customize your settings so that you can set a maximum number of possible words to be included per Wordle. Another problem that I encountered was that Wordle would separate a phrase of words that I wanted to stay together. After reading other users' blogs, I discovered that you have to insert a ~ in between any words that you want to stay together (example: Keshia~Seitz). Yet another issue that I had with the Wordle website was that there was no search field for people to search for a specific Wordle (at least that I could find). The only option given under the Gallery link is to "view older Wordles". For me, this was very frustrating as I was trying to find the Wordle that I had created myself. A final issue that could arise was something that I read in another Wordle users' blog. The blogger advised that teachers be careful when allowing students to browse the Wordles in the gallery because the Wordles may contain explicit or mature content that is not appropriate for the educational setting. This blogger said that this issue could be easily resolved by checking with your network administrator at your school and asking them to configure your "site-blocking" software to keep such inappropriate Wordles out of your classroom.