I explored Wordle for my first emerging technology. The website is www.Wordle.net. I had never even heard of this application before, and I must admit I had a really fun time with it. I took the first paragraph from a blog entry I made recently for another class, copied it into the form, clicked create, and then changed the font and colors until I came up with this result. The blog post was about my "Mission" as a graphic design graduate student. I think the Wordle picture really captures the main ideas of my paragraph. The word Mission is very bold and that is what the paragraph was all about. Other important words stand out, like design, graphic, and thought.
I can see this being a very useful tool in a writing class. Students can copy and paste an essay they wrote into Wordle, and if the words that it emphasises are the main concepts of their assignment, it's probably a good indicator that they did a good job sticking to their subject. It could then be a fun and creative addition to the assignment. It could be printed out as a cover to the essay.
I think this application should mostly be used for a fun supplement to a writing assignment and shouldn't be taken too seriously. Students shouldn't use this as an alternative to thoroughly proofreading their work.
An issue I had using this technology was trying to figure out what to do with it after it was created. There was not a simple "save" button. I printed it to my computer as a pdf. I then took the pdf into photoshop and turned it into a jpeg that I could upload onto this blog. I think there should be a way to save the image from the application to a jpeg or other image format.
I did this technology also. I never could copy my Wordle to put on my blog page. I used 3 different computers and they all seemed to have blocs. I too had a problem that there was no SAVE.I couldn't get it to pdf either.
ReplyDeleteSome of these programs need to be more user friendly!!
Gina S.
I learned about Wordle about a year ago and have used it periodically in my classroom. I've run into the same problem with saving the image, and have found I can only do it on my Mac (where Save as a PDF is an option). Overall, though, it's a fun program my students enjoy using. I'm just trying to find creative ways for my upper level students to use it.
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