Wordle in the English language classroom

Wordle creates word clouds from any piece of text. The image above is the word cloud of this blog; created by entering the blog’s RSS feed URL into Wordle. The resulting word clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently, and it’s possible to change the font, layout and colours of your word cloud to suit.

Nik Peachey has created a short video “How to create a Wordle” which explains the process.

For those interested in their blog content from an SEO / marketing perspective, Wordle can give a useful insight into the keywords being used, as Bill Gaffney’s post “Wordle as an online marketing and SEO tool” demonstrates.

Wordle was originally designed as a ‘toy’ but people are finding a variety of  interesting uses for it and there are many ideas in the following blog posts, and the subsequent comments, that can be used, and adpated for use, in the English language classroom:

Top 20 uses for Wordle from The Clever Sheep blog;

Digital Storytelling Part IX – Wordle from the Langwitches blog;

and Wordle: using word clouds in a lesson from Box of Tricks.

So far, I’ve used Wordle three times in my lessons. I created word clouds of news articles for students to read and to then put forward suggestions for the main topic/s of the article. The key words in the word cloud helped them to get the gist of the article, and its intent, and to then write their own news article based on the key words; and finally to compare their writing to the original. This procedure could be used for other genres of text and I have used it fairly successfully with short poems.

In another lesson I elicited from each student words they associate with their home countries, and words they associate with life in the UK. We then created word clouds for each set of words and compared them – with interesting results.