wordle

http://www.shemrock.com/little-red-riding-hood.htm

www.wordle.net

Hi everyone, today I am going to introduce a tool which works similarly to WORDSIFT but it also has a few interesting additional advantages compared to the Wordsift. In general, Wordle is designed to generate word clouds straightaway from any text of your choice. The clouds will give an enormous effect on each word, from  the most frequent word used in the text to the least one. Basically,there's no need for you to sign up for an account. All you can do is just go to www.wordle.net and click on the CREATE button in order to create your own word clouds.

This tool is very much recommended to be used with texts which will be taught in the classroom learning. Teachers may find this tool is very helpful in transforming the text into attractive and colorful word clouds. All you can do is just a simple thing of copying and pasting the text in the box provided. As you can see in the red circle, a bunch of text has been pasted before the tool does the job to create the word clouds. If you don't wanna use this method, don't worry because alternatives will also be provided. Below the main  box, there are two other options which allow you to either paste the URL of any blog, blog feed or any other web page that has an Atom or RSS feed OR you can simply enter a del.icio.us user name in order to see their tags. However in this example, I have chosen a short story entitled The Little Red Riding Hood from a website http://www.shemrock.com/little-red-riding-hood.htm. Having that bunch of text pasted in the box, I then click on the submit button and just within seconds, the word clouds will appear!

This is the example of the word clouds. The biggest word you can see is definitely the word WOLF followed by the word RED, RIDING, HOOD, GIRL COTTAGE, GRAND,MA, BIG, FOREST and the list goes on an on as they are in the below picture. In pedagogical aspect, this tool can actually act as a stimulus for the learner to actually predict what may come up in the real text, in which to prepare them to have a little bit of knowledge about the text. I would also emphasis that the teacher can use these word clouds to activate the learners schemata before giving them some space to guess the chronology of the story. After all, it is all depending on the teaching aim and what the Students Will Be Able To ,SWBAT's aim at the end of the lesson. As the teacher, the control is in your hand :)

The sweet things about WORDLE

1. Fun and interactive learning for students. The colorful layouts are very attractive and suitable in catching the learners' attention.
2. Teacher can save and print out the word clouds in order to facilitate a reading activity (especially in activating schemata and introducing vocabs )
3. You can just simply copy a text and paste them in the box before getting all the words in the nice word clouds.

The NOT so sweet about WORDLE

1. You cant make your masterpiece private once you've saved them, the whole world will get the chance to see them.
2. Students might get distracted because the colours are too colourful!
3. Not suitable for all colourblinders~