My First Wordle; pretty cool!!!

Had a fantastic ICT lesson this week looking at technologies that we can use in our teaching. The picture above is a word cloud, created in Wordle. This is the first time that I have ever been encouraged to search out new things on the internet and it is a lot of fun exploring.

The word cloud is made up of a group of words that you enter, such as a poem or piece of text etc. Wordle will then create a pictorial view of your words. You can then play about with the picture, altering the design and colour for maximum impact. When I created my first Wordle, I immediately saw the potential for it to be used in teaching. I believe that Wordle and other such websites could be used to create a high impact picture of associated words, possibly a mind map or the result of a brain storming session. The size and position of the words can be manipulated. So for instance if you want a certain word to be centre stage then it need to be entered more times than any of the others. I am going to have play around with some educationally inspired word clouds using Wordle and will post my results.