Thursday, July 31, 2008

Wordle

A few weeks ago another teacher shared a site called Wordle. I had tried it at that point and put it aside as something that my students would probably enjoy doing, and that would a decent first day of school activity. This evening, there was a mention of the site on the Red Cross blog, so I went back and did some more exploring.
Wordle allows you to enter your own text to create a "cloud", or an amorphous collection of random things. Del.ici.ous, the social bookmarking site, and others, allow viewing of tags as clouds too. Other options for Wordle include creating a cloud from tags at a social bookmarking site, or as I did tonight, from a blog or any website with an RSS or Atom feed. You can change colors, layout, font, or how you list the words. I see some interesting possibilities for this in the classroom.
Here's the one I made this evening...