Wordle

=Wordle= @http://www.wordle.net/

What is wordle? 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. Look under resources to get some ideas of why you should use Wordle in your classroom!


 * Topic: Wordle**
 * Workshop Length:** 1 Hour
 * Workshop Materials:** Computer Lab or Laptops, Projector
 * Max Number Of Participants:** 15
 * Short Description:** In this workshop, participants will
 * Goals Of Workshop:** Participants will
 * 1) Understand the components of a worlde
 * 2) Create your own wordle
 * 3) learn how to save a wordle and insert it in a blog or website
 * 4) Brainstorm Ideas for use of blogs in the classroom


 * Format of Workshop:** hands on, discussion, demonstration, project based
 * Alignment with District Goals**: This workshop supports the 2006-2009 Salem School District Technology Plan by matching the skills gained to the following technology plan goals.

__**Teaching and Learning Goals **__ All teachers will use technology to improve instruction and student assessment. __**Literacy Goals **__ Literacy represents the ability to responsibly employ appropriate technology to access, process, and communicate information.  Students and Staff will:
 * Teachers and administrators will use technology to collect and analyze student assessment data
 * Demonstrate basic technology operations and concepts
 * Effectively express ideas using suitable media

=**Resources**= Learn how to use wordle effectivly in your classroom by clicking on the link below. @http://techlearning.com/blogs/24518

Check out these cool lesson ideas!

 (retrieved from: http://www.brighthub.com/education/k-12/articles/58905.aspx) 1. __**Personal Narratives**__: Write, or copy and paste, a personal narrative into Wordle. Students will be able to see what is important to their peers from the words that are produced from the Wordle word clouds. Compare the words that are used most often by boys, or girls, by age group, or by class/grade level. These Wordle lessons make great displays outside a classroom.

2. **__Famous Speeches__**: Enter the text of a famous historical speech into Wordle. Analyze the results by looking at the most commonly used words, or even the words that are not used. What does this tell us about the orator and their intentions? Go to @http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/previous.htm or @http://www.americanrhetoric.com/top100speechesall.html for a list of historical speeches you may want to get started with.

3. __**Create a Wordle Gift**__: Mother's Day, Father's Day, Grandparent's Day, or even Teacher Appreciation Day, can all be celebrated with Wordle. Input your favorite adjectives for your chosen person, generate the word cloud, and add it to a greeting card, poster, calendar, or whatever else you choose. Remember, Wordle clouds can be downloaded as JPEGS or PNGS if you take a screenshot of your word cloud and save it to your computer, (command+shift+4 on a Mac will give you the option of saving a selected portion of your screen).

4. __**Classroom Polls**__: Instead of your traditional bar graph or pictograph, try using Wordle to organize your data. What is the favorite color in your class? Have all students take turns at entering their favorite color in to Wordle and generate the resulting cloud. Bigger words = more popular colors. Repeat with ice cream flavors, pets, family members, etc.

5. **__Compare and Contrast__**: Use Wordle as a compare and contrast tool. Compare and contrast the word clouds of two or more students' writing, famous speeches, song lyrics , news reports, book reviews or whatever else you may need to compare in your classroom studies. 6. **__Student Profiles__**: I have done this with PowerPoint before, but recently saw someone do the same with Wordle lessons. Have all students in your class write a few positive adjectives about each of their classmates anonymously. Compile all the papers, input the adjectives for each student into Wordle, and generate a student profile word cloud to give back to the student. Children always enjoy this positive feedback exercise, and it can be a great end of year activity to take home from the last day of school.

7. __**Current Affairs Analysis**__: Copy and paste a news story into Wordle. What could the story have been about? Can you guess what the headline would have been? Where could have it taken place? These questions and more make this a worthy discussion exercise.

8. __**Wordle Word Walls**__: Brighten up your word walls with Wordle lessons. Students can brainstorm synonyms, antonyms, or definitions for their list of vocabulary words. Add your word clouds to your existing word wall work to help stimulate those higher thinking skills in your students. Keep a tally of the targeted vocabulary words that the children use in speech on a daily basis, and them to a Wordle cloud to show which are used most often.

9. **__Unit Review/Preview Posters__**: Students can create KWL charts on what they would like to learn and find out about a given topic. Alternatively, create word clouds at the end of a unit to summarize the key learning points or vocabulary from a given topic.

10. **__Historical Document Analysis__**: Have you ever wondered what the Magna Carta or Declaration of Independence would look like when pasted into Wordle? Try it and see. There will be lots of talking points from the resulting word cloud. What do you predict you will see? What themes can you identify? How does the word cloud fit in with the historical context of the document?