Former teacher for teachers
I’m a former school teacher of English. Now I teach (
better say help) teachers as a methodist to use modern educational techniques. Here
are some useful sites and blogs I run.
Modern educational techniques
Wordle in education
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
http://www.wordle.net/
Wordle tutorial
For those of you who haven’t used Wordle before, it’s a fun tool that creates “word clouds” from text that you provide. The largest words in the cloud are ones that are used the most in the text, and the smallest words are used the least. You can experiment with different layouts, fonts and color schemes (as well as editing your original text to eliminate words or make others more prominent). The resulting clouds are visually interesting, and provide many opportunities for educational use. Some of the advantages of using Wordle include that it is free and easy to use, and that you don’t need an account (so no additional passwords to remember!). A downside is that Wordle is not “policed” for content, so it’s possible that younger students could find inappropriate content if they search the gallery images. Also, you cannot save your Wordle directly as an image, although you could save it to the online gallery or print it. If you want your Wordle preserved as an image you could take a screen shot and then edit that using image editing software. Many blogs brainstorm on educational use of Wordle, and here are some interesting lists of ways to use Wordle:
What do the 21st century students need?
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