Tools for Teachers
Wordle
Website: http://www.wordle.net
The creators of Wordle define this free tool as a toy. Wordle is definitely fun to play with, but it's also a learning tool for visualizing and analyzing text. And it's adaptable to learning objectives for K–12.
Plug a block of text, a URL, or even delicious bookmarks into Wordle, and the program generates a word cloud—a graphic that amplifies font sizes of words based on how frequently they are used in the material you've provided.
Educators have generously shared examples of classroom adaptations of Wordle to build vocabulary (a useful tool for ESL learners) and to write and discuss literature; many of these examples are adaptable to analyze and simplify primary source documents in the history classroom; wordle graphics can jump start close reading of primary sources.
Fewer examples specifically address Wordle in history and social studies instruction, but blog postings such as Rodd Lucier's Top 20 Uses for Wordle offer a number of cross-curricular examples of using Wordle to foster analytical thinking and to help explore relationships and themes. "Show Today in History stories in a new way," he suggests, and the resulting Wordle graphic on the Cuban Missile Crisis creates a picture in which the words Kennedy, Soviet, Cuba, and atomic dominate.
Be forewarned as you look for Wordle examples: search terms count. On Google, using the phrase Wordle in the Classroom or Teaching with Wordle will yield useful examples; however, Teaching History with Wordle or Teaching Social Studies with Wordle brings you listings for teaching WORLD history, not Wordle.
Word Cloud Analysis of Obama's Inaugural Speech Compared to Bush, Clinton, Reagan, Lincoln's offers instant analytical possibilities. For example, Lincoln's most frequently used word in his first inaugural address is Constitution; in his second, war dominates.
This Slideshare presentation, Free Tools: Middle School Tech, suggests a collaborative learning exercise applicable to exploring primary source documents. Pupils looked at word clouds created from articles and tried to ascertain the gist of original articles. Half the class then explained to the other half what they thought their article was about while the teacher displayed each word cloud in turn on an interactive white board highlighting the words one at a time and extracting relevant useful vocabulary. The teacher then handed out copies of the original articles in full to pupils and discussed vocabulary further.
The Boston Globe offers a visualization of The Candidate as a Pile of Words, a visualization of the blogs of President Obama and Senator McCain.
Teacher Tube offers a four-minute video demonstrating the program.
Comments
From the Clearinghouse: Good
From the Clearinghouse:
Good point! Thank you. Open source refers to shared software that users are welcome to modify and develop according to their own needs. Proponents of open source software quite specifically differentiate it from free software--which may come with limitations and qualifications on ownership, use, and reproduction. (The Clearinghouse, for example, is built on the open source content management platform, Drupal.)
Open source has also taken on a more extended cultural meaning to refer to using and sharing many kinds of content and information besides software. Here again, issues of copyright, patent, and attribution become delicate.
Wordle may be gratis, but it
Wordle may be gratis, but it is not Open Source.