Wordle

Just a few thoughts on Wordles (presented in a Wordle!). It's an interesting way of displaying opinions and thoughts. In Wordles more common words appear larger than the less common words, so they display the information in an almost graph like manner with an emphasis on more common words or dominant ideologies and themes.

They're also so easy to use! I can imagine asking students to create them as an activity to express dominant themes in texts that we read in English classes or even in a statistical class in mathematics to display data collection. Alternatively I could create one to display to the class, although that is less personalized and interactive. They do require access to the internet and computors though, which may be unjustifiable to a school with limited resources. Also I doubt Wordle really encourages critical thinking, or thinking at a deep level. Certainly creating a Wordle does not require the analysis, synthesis or evaluation of its content especially considering that all that is required to create them is the copying and pasting of words.

There is certainly a place for Wordles and they are a fun, light hearted way of considering text but whether they are a valuable learning tool, well, how about making one and seeing for yourself? Available at http://www.wordle.net/