What is Wordle?

     Wordle is a free-online program that creates word clouds from text that you provide. You can adjust the size of the word by increasing or decreasing the frequency of the word in the text. However, it is important to note that you cannot edit the text once you have created the Wordle. You can adjust the font, color scheme and layout of the text, though. The word collages that you create with the program can be printed or saved to a Wordle gallery and shared with others. (http://www.wordle.net)

Tutorial:

     Here is a great tutorial video on how to use the program, Wordle.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhL5D9nz5aI

How Can it be Used?

     There are a plethora of ways in which Wordle can be used and applied in any mathematics classroom, PreK-12th Grade. Below you can find a list of these ideas. Wordle is a great way to make instruction student centered and enhance the teaching and learning of important vocabulary. Beyond the actual words, students can apply its method and frequency charts to mathematical data analysis and statistics (as explained below). Also, it gives the teacher insight to students' thinking and offers a creative outlet for them to take ownership of their learning.

• Introduction:
• Lead class discussion for an upcoming unit-The teacher can ask students why they think certain words appear more than others and how they think the topics will be applied in the real-world.
• Pre-assessment- Teachers can have students create their own Wordles about the new unit given the vocabulary the teacher provides. Students can make the topics they understand a larger size (i.e. they will have a higher frequency in the text box), and then the terms they do not understand can be a smaller size, or vise versa. This gives teachers a quick visual understanding of what their students already know, and the topics they need to focus on.
• Get-to-know-you Activity (Personalized Wordle)- Students can create a Wordle about themselves at the beginning of the year and present it to the class so the teacher and classmates can get to know them better. (see examples below)

• Review:
• Review for an exam- Teachers can provide students with a Wordle created from the actual text of the exam, or based on the point distribution of topics on the exam. This allows students to see which topics are weighted more heavily on the test and can help them prepare accordingly.
• Post-assessment- Students can create their own Wordles using the concepts and vocabulary from the unit. The teacher could require the students to justify their reasoning as to why they made certain words appear larger than others and give examples.

• Activity:
• Article Word-Use Analysis: For a data and statistics unit in a math classroom, Wordle can be used for a data analysis activity.  In this activity, students would bring in an online article with a link to that article.  The students have the opportunity to choose whatever article they like about any appropriate topic.  Then, they would copy and paste the text of the article, after they have read it, into the create page of the Wordle website, and they could create a Wordle that is a summary of the article.  Using the "Language" tool of the page, students can select the "Show Word Count" option.  This shows the number of times a word appears in the article.  It also allows students to remove the commonly used words in the English language (or any other language for that matter) so that words like "to," "the," "and," etc. do not show in the Wordle.  Using the word count tool, students can enter the data into a table in their calculator and analyze the frequency of the words in the article.  The students would find the mode of the data, or the most commonly used word, the median of the data, or the word that has a frequency in which half of the words have a higher frequency, and the mean of the data, or the average frequency of the words.  Using all of this data, students could make a box and whisker plot to see the data represented in a graph.  Also, students can calculate the ratios of different words by comparing their frequency to the total number of words.  Below is an example of a wordle created from an arcticle from CNN.com and its word count table that could be used in this activity:

http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/10/25/money.tips.social.media/index.html

• Poll/Survey Display- Students can create their own poll to survey peers about a topic of interest to them. Some examples may include favorite sports teams, ice creams, location of birth, number of hours spent studying, watching television... etc. Once students compile their data, they can create a Wordle that displays their results. The size of the words used in the Wordle should be proportionate to the data they collected in order to be an accurate display.
• Vocabulary Sorting- For different topics, especially in geometry, students can use Wordle to reinforce important vocabulary terms from the unit. Similar to a "word sort" activity, students can organize the vocabulary words using Wordle's alphabetize setting.



•  Cover Page:
• Journal/Portfolio- For journals, notebooks, or portfolios that students create, they can use Wordle to make a cover page. The coverpage will then serve as a brief synopsis of what can be found in the literary piece.

• Prioritizing Curriculum:
• Addressing Standards- Teachers can use Wordle to prioritize which concepts in math are the most important to teach. Below is the Wordle we created from copying the text of the Colorado Academic Standards for mathematics. It is important to notice that "students" is the most frequent word displayed. With this in mind, we must consider that in the end, our students are the reason we are teaching and it is their learning and progress that is most important. (Colorado Academic Standards- http://www.cde.state.co.us/cdeassess/UAS/AdoptedAcademicStandards/Math_Standards_Adopted_12.10.09.pdf)

Links to Additional Wordle Resources:  

• Wordle Website
• http://www.wordle.net  
• Ideas for Wordles in the classroom
• http://kditzlerteacherresourcepage.wikispaces.com/Wordle
• A blog entry about Wordle and math vocabulary
• http://www.ed-tech-4-math.com/2008/12/12/math-vocabulary-becomes-art/  
• PowerPoint on "48 Interesting Ways to Use Wordle in the Classroom"
•  https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dhn2vcv5_157dpbsg9c5  
• Blog on Wordle as a math pre-reading strategy
• http://mathpaige.wordpress.com/2010/09/07/my-love-of-wordle 
• Example of a Wordle made in a classroom:
• http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/1126475/mathglossary 

Kelsey Kreager and Rachel Ritter