Wordle Wonder

I’ve heard a lot about Wordle lately… and I do think it is beautiful… and I do think that people could do a lot of analysis about writing with it. It makes for possibly interesting discussions about theme and many other things… before even reading the text.

So I did a wordle from Barack’s speech in Berlin. Here it is:

It’s easy and fun to make… I’m betting it has a ton of implications and possibilities in the English classroom… thinking it might be fun here and there in the German classroom… perhaps when they are reading articles in the upper levels… do one of these first to find which words they should be sure that they know and understand in order to really “get the gist” of the article.

Here’s a quick example:

There was an article in the German news-machine, der Spiegel, about Obama’s Vice-President list.  Here is the link to the article: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,568623,00.html

Taking the text and putting it into Wordle creates this:

“Wordle: Obama Vize-Praesident”

So students should be sure they know many of the names that are listed there as well as the German words (many of them cognates… but, dependent on the student, they could look at even some of the medium to small words to be sure they will be prepared for the reading that day). What a great way to start class… give them something to do as they wait for the bell to ring.

Any other ideas for Wordle use in the classroom?