Although my most adamant advocacy is always to “start with the image,” ultimately Visual Literacy requires our students to learn to process both words and pictures. They must be able to move gracefully and fluently between text and images, between the concrete and the abstract, between literal and figurative worlds.

This wonderful new, free application – www.wordle.net – provides a fantastic tool to introduce new vocabulary, to focus on key words, to review (using words that recall images, videos, and visual as well as other sensory experiences), and even to assess by having students color in the words (on black and white Wordles) to demonstrate understanding.

Technically speaking
Just a quick word on how Wordle works, from a technical perspective. The two Wordles above were created by weighting the words, a function of the Advanced section of the application. I just created a Word doc with nine words that I would use to describe the essence of the program, and gave each word a number to represent the relative size I wanted displayed in my “Wordle” Wordle.

wordle: 1400
clouds: 1200
text: 900
create: 900
words: 800
colors: 750
layouts: 700
fonts: 650
frequency: 600

Then, I copied that list from the Word document and pasted it into the “Paste weighted words or phrases here” in the designated box in the Advanced section of the Wordle website.

As best I’ve been able to determine, through trial and error and through checking out the Forum where users post questions and answers on the Wordle website, the numbers are more an art than a science. One thing I would say is that any word weighted less than 600 will be too small to be legible if your final display size will be 72 dpi and less than 300 pixels wide by 200 pixels high, e.g., if your intended goal is a low resolution thumbnail for the web. On the other hand, if you are making larger charts or posters, you can add a lot more words and make at least some of them significantly smaller. (See discussion of the Poster Maker large format printer later in this article.)

Other options are to input text by importing it from digitally saved documents (pasting in a “bunch of text”), or to enter the URL of any blog, blog feed, or any other web page that has an Atom or RSS feed, or to enter a del.icio.us user name to see their tags!  

Credit where credit’s due
Jonathan Feinberg, a Senior Software Engineer at IBM Research in Medford, Massachusetts (U.S.), creates, as he states in his blog: “useful collaborative applications.” He adds, modestly: “I also made Wordle.” In the Credits, he writes: “I acknowledge my employer, IBM Research, for extending me the extraordinary privilege of using code, which I wrote on their time, for this personal project. While I did develop this web site on my own time, I developed the core algorithms for laying out and displaying words on company time.”

Examples of educational use
As evidenced by the Wordles posted in the online Gallery and comments by users in the online Forum, let alone the tangible enthusiasm from audience members when I show Wordle in my presentations, this is a product whose price is right (free) and whose use in education is growing exponentially.

I’ll just give a few examples here. I’d love to expand this article with examples from YOU. So, send me a paragraph about your idea and a .jpg or .png of your Wordle (or the date and time you posted it to wordle.net) and permission to add it to this article and – giving you full credit – possibly including it in my presentations and/or upcoming book(s) and article(s) for the benefit of other educators worldwide. Send to: lynellb@aol.com  

Example 1: Bookends (Wordle + Educational Video + Wordle)
In the good old Leave It to Beaver days (which happened before most of you reading this were born), classrooms were relatively homogenous. All 25-30 students came from the same ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and socio-economic groups, so teachers could assume and draw upon a common bank of background knowledge and experience. (Some kids might be smarter, others might learn differently, but they all had been to Disneyland!) Now, even if the economic status is similar (as in enclaves like Leesburg, VA where homes range from two to five million dollars), the students come from many different countries and bring a wide range of life experiences to the classroom. In order to create common knowledge, short of a field trip, the best way is to show a video. The teacher might use a Wordle with a few keywords to alert students what to be looking for and listening to in the video, but the vocabulary focus would come mainly after having seen the concepts, ideas and activities in the video.

The good folks at 100% Educational Videos, www.schoolvideos.com, have recently come on board the “Wordle Wagon.” They are considering the possibility of posting Wordles for all of their K-8 videos to give teachers a quick way to “preview” the content. For starters, CEO Eric Dahm and Production Supervisor Colleen Jackson took one of their popular educational DVDs, Weathering & Erosion, and pasted the script into the “Paste in a bunch of text” box under the Create tab in Wordle to create the following cloud:  

I created a second Wordle, with just 12 words, that teachers could give to students as a “preview,” and use for discussing (and recalling) the video later. The Weather Wordle could even serve as a review or assessment tool: For example, the teacher could give a definition of changes and ask the students to color that word in blue – changes. 

The teacher could pause the video at appropriate spots to focus on volcanoes, for example, or project an image (from the video or a complementary still) and ask the students to color the word volcanoes in red.

Weather Wordles could be printed out in a variety of sizes, depending on the purpose. 8x10s could go to individual students to color and put in a notebook or a backpack. With a Poster Maker™ large format printer – if you have access to one at your school or through another school making posters as part of a student-run business or fund-raiser – you can print the Wordles 17-inches high for individual or partner work, 23 or 29-inches high for group work, and 29 or 36-inches high for class displays. (The paper comes on a roll, so the width can be as wide as you want!)  

NOTE: The age and ability of the students, the depth you wish to pursue on the topic, and the coloring tools you choose will determine the number of words for your Wordle. For example, with black as the background (because other colors “pop” against it and because it’s more forgiving of coloring outside the lines), students would use every color in the box except black, so you could color nine (9) words with Crayola’s 10 Classic Colors broad line markers.

Example 2: Colors Wordle
Use the Advanced section of Wordles to weight the colors. Make the word colors the biggest, followed by the primary colors (red, blue and yellow), then the secondary colors (purple, green and orange), and maybe a few other common colors like gray, brown, and pink (in the Crayola™ 12-pack). Print out the Wordle with white letters on a black background. Click here for a high-resolution (300dpi) black and white jpeg of the Colors Wordle.  

I gave a black and white printout of the Colors Wordle along with a box of 64 Crayola™ crayons to a bright, creative kindergarten student named Emma. I asked her to color each word in “the right color” and then to color each letter of the word colors in a different color. She had no problem identifying all the color words. She had her own idea how to color the word colors:  

Read More»
Click here to download the full .pdf of this 20-page article. It includes many more tips on using Wordle and seven more great, easy-to-replicate classroom examples, including two versions of the following Love Wordle, just in time for Valentine’s Day: 

Hopefully these examples will inspire you to board the Wordle Wagon, to use this fun (and free) tool to create handouts and posters that will complement the videos, projected images, and other visual and sensory stimuli needed to engage your students in the kind of learning that sticks for, during, and, more importantly, after the test.

Help spread the Love and other Wordles that you and your students create. Happy wordling!  

* * *

Postscript
This just (already) in from 100% Educational Videos CEO, Eric Dahm:  

Yes, you guessed it. He wordled my 20-page article! And offered a suggestion that could be a great assignment for students: Write a summary description based on the visual feedback.

Using large words, Eric wrote the following description:

Wordle is a way for students to create an image with words and use color to explore their relationships.

Thanks, Eric.

Looking forward to more of you out there sharing your best Wordles and Wordle ideas.

- Lynell Burmark
www.educatebetter.org
lynellb@aol.com