Polonius: What do you read Sir? - Hamlet: Wordle, Wordle, Wordle

Dear Fellow coursemates,

Web 2.0 has revolutionized the Internet . It's constantly offering new tools and applications that are meant to make our surfing as comfortable as possible. They also try to meet our ever changing needs and caprices. One of these tools is Wordle. It is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that one provides. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. These clouds could be tweaked with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle become yours to use in whatever way you like . You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with friends. To me, 'Wordle' would be a good way to present the key points of a lesson. Being visual learners, students would very likely find it easy to remember the 'Wordled' summary of a lesson. Another possible use of this tool is asking students to read a passage or a story and summarize it in a 'Wordle' manner. For language teachers, I think it could be used to recycle previously taught vocabulary and help students remember irregular verbs. There are, of course, other possible uses that teachers could think of depending on their particular teaching situations. Wordle is a fun tool and that's what I like most about it. Well, after I submited all my assignments of Week4.0, I thought to myself why not Wordle all my coursemates names and see how it looks... Hope you like the word cloud below

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/2236143/Webskills_coursemates_names

Regards

Arbi