Sunday, December 13, 2009

Wordle-now more than just a cool looking thing to my students

I used Wordle in my classroom earlier in the year for collaboration and seeing trends in ideas for classroom behaviors and what ideal group work looks like.  Students were "wowed" with the tool and some went home to make their own Wordles on fun topics of their own interest.  Up until recently, they'd just seen Wordle as a "fun" thing to do.

Two weeks ago, the students composed descriptive essays.  The major goal of this assignment was to work on "spicy writing" that encompassed the senses.  After prewriting, drafting, peer revisions, and composing their second draft, I modeled to students how Wordle could be used to help with their word choice.  I took a sample essay and pasted it into Wordle.  We had a class discussion on the larger words in the Wordle.  Students knew from previous use of Wordle that these words appeared more often in the essay.  I then showed them the online dictionary/thesauraus Visuwords.  Ooos and Ahs resonated around the room as webs appeared on the screen with suggestions for different words to use. 

To make a long story short, some students really grasped the use of these tools and analyzed their own essays in Wordle.  They then used Visuwords to find better words to use.  Part of the essay rubric was that students showed evidence of changes in word choice.  Many students made a couple changes on their Wordle to show that evidence.   Here is a top notch example of the way one of my students did this:



This student circled common words and found a variety of more descriptive words to replace them with using Visuwords. 

It may seem simple, but I really saw Wordle come to life in an applicable way for many of my students.  They do still think it's a "fun" and "cool" tool, but they also see how it can be used to improved their writing. 

8 comments:

  1. I love how you have used Wordle, awesome work.

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  2. Great idea, thanks for sharing. Tools like Wordle make learning fun. Thanks for the link to Visuwords- another tool that I didn't know was out there.
    Louise

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  3. Great use of wordle...from the beginning, right through to the circling of words to show evidence of learning. Well done and thanks for sharing!

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  4. Thanks a lot for this post! I had used Wordle like this before but never had heard of Visuwords. The combination of the two tools is a real great idea.

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  5. What a great idea and practical use for Wordle. If you are interested, here is a link to an example (that I created) to show my students as to why they may need to use it for their essays. I tell them it is a student essay, but they don't buy that for very long. :) It gets the point across in any case.

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/35276766@N04/4243069194/

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  6. Good stuff! Passed this one on at work...

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  7. This is fabulous! I love all of it. I'm afraid to use it for my blog. FABULOUS would be VERY large. : )

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