Wordle

I have recently been introduced to a cool tool called Wordle. This is a great tool for teachers. What the program does is to accept text we put into it and the program represents it in a graphical way with the key words bigger than the others. It is a word diagram that let's us see the submitted text in a different way. The key words or the most used words are bigger than others. What this does is to provide the reader with a new perspective on the work.

For example I submitted "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost. The result was amazing and very telling.



I took an Op-ed by David Brooks and submitted it. Once you look at it you will immediately know the main points of the Op-ed.



Teachers have taken scholar work and submitted it with phenomenal results. The visual presentation of text usually presented in paragraph form provides the writer and reader with another perspective. As teachers we want our scholars to discover the main ideas or keywords of a passage and now a tool like Wordle helps us.

When introducing a text, perhaps a Wordle presentation may be a good way to present the text before we present it in its traditional way. The scholars will see the key words and have some clues about the text before they actually read it.

Take a passage from Shakespeare and see what happens. This tool will help you in class, try it.

What about a politcal speech?