Visuals can be a powerful means of expressing lots of information. Teachers who increasingly migrate their knowledge in the form of text to the web through blogs and wikis have a cool new web 2.0 tool, Wordle. Wordle is a web-based program running javascript that transforms lists of words, websites, rss feeds, and tags into pictures. I ran the program on my blog to generate the above image. Some websites use a similar technique to create tag clouds, where the most frequent words are proportionally larger than others.
The Boston Globe’s Ideas section recently published (Sunday, 8/3/2008) a Wordle comparison of John McCain’s blog to Barack Obama’s blog and discovered that the most used word on each blog was “Obama.” Some Wordle lesson ideas for students:
- copy and paste a student essay into the “bunch of text” feature to analyze vocabulary use
- compare the use of words used on several websites about the same topic
- create word collages as art projects; color palettes, fonts, and backgrounds are fully customizable.
What are your ideas for using text visuals in the classroom?