Ok, I found a great article on using wordle or tagxedo effectively in a classroom. Which site is better? Tagxedo has more bells and whistles, but it requires some installation. In our school, only an administrator can download onto the computers. Therefore, I either need some help, or I can use wordle. Either one is a site for creating word clouds. Basically, you import text, choose a shape, and presto! You have a visual representation of your text, with the most frequent text appearing as both the largest and the darkest words. How can we use these sites to their fullest advantage? Blogger Ben Rimes highlights three ways to go beyond a simple representation in his article.
1. Math: Use the word cloud to input data about frequency and probability. Instead of the same old boring bar chart, have students put the data right into wordle or tagxedo, and see visually what word occurs most frequently.
2. English: Have students copy and paste writing into wordle. By using this, they can see what words they are using too often. After seeing the frequency of words in their essay, they can substitute more colorful words in their stead.
3. History: Rimes used wordle to create a visual representation of United States elections. He pasted inaugural speeches from various presidents to see what issues were affecting society at the time.
These are just a few ideas Rimes created to get beyond the "fluff" uses for web 2.0 tools. If anyone has any more ideas, feel free to post them here!
These are all substantial uses- I want to avoid the "fluff" too!
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