Have you tried Wordle? If you provide the text, Wordle will create a word cloud that will display each word used in the source text in a font size based on the frequency that the word appears in the source. The more the word is used, the larger it appears. Take a look at Wordle’s gallery to see some examples.
Some have criticized Wordle by suggesting that Wordle’s only attribute is that it is eye-catching.
I’m okay with that. I can work with eye-catching. Below is a Wordle I made using all the text from a recent test.
A few days before the test, I shared this with my students. They were eager to hypothesize as to how words like “astronaut” or “gravy” would be used to access there knowledge of friction and momentum. Some student suggested possible questions that used the terms from the word cloud. A few of their questions were so good that I plan to use them next year.
While Woodle wasn’t able to teach physics, it was able to start a conversation. That’s perfect. I can take it from there.
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Wordle is so much more than eye candy! It’s a great way to identify important vocabulary in a text as well as introduce important concepts before reading. It can also be used to analyze statistics – last year we entered all of the discipline write-ups for our team into Wordle to see what offenses were most common, and whose name appeared most frequently!
What a neat idea! I’ve wondered about how to use it in a math classroom and this has given me ideas!
Brilliant! I just ran my final exam through and am happy with the results. Bonus: my questions are coded with the standard, so kids can readily see which standards are more emphasized.