Tools/Wordle

Illustrate content as a word cloud - using Wordle +

Tool Description There are a batch of web tools that make a ‘word cloud^(tool)’ showing the frequency of the words used in a document. You can ‘feed’ the web tool a web page of text; a blog or whatever text is in a clipboard. WORDLE (wordle.net) is one of the batch: you could feed it with your work scheme or the collected work of the class. Typically the bigger the word displayed, the more frequently it has been used. Wordle can be used to make an informative cover page for a project, and has been used to analyse speeches, perhaps to see how interesting or tedious they can be!
Word clouds become nearly not a toy when they are 'tag clouds'. A visitor to TAGCLOUD (tagcloud.com) may wonder how it is different. However the words in a tag cloud of your syllabus are live links. So when you click on a word in the cloud, that might start a Google search. A tag cloud can be embedded in a school web page and perhaps used to introduce your subject. The words can be confined to the shape a chemistry filter funnel or a picture of your choosing. ^(edit)

Teaching Approach. Word and tag clouds are great tools for visualisation^(ta) of the language^(ta) used in any document, or - if you feed the document in - a Scheme of Work or topic. ^(edit)

Tool details
Title	Illustrate content as a word cloud
Topic
Licence / Cost / Platform	web tool
Subject / Categories
Teaching Ideas / Links
Link	http://www.wordle.net/ http://tagul.com/ http://tagxedo.com http://tagcloud.com