clipped from wordle.net

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.

I had a little go at making some. You can use your own – or someone else’s del.icio.us username to create a cloud – here’s one for http://del.icio.us/lisibo

and another for http://del.icio.us/whitehousecommon (my school del.icio.us account)

I love these visual representations of my bookmarks as they highlight the most popular tags so clearly(the text size for each word is related to the number of times it appears) and it’s pleasing to see that the focus of my tagging is where I thought it was ;o)

You can also input random words to create a cloud. So I tried pasting my last blog post into the text box and came out with this –

There are some other great examples in the Wordle gallery including:
How to survive a Zombie attack

Here’s a French one – very topical too –
Le Coupe d’Europe

and a Spanish one –
Inteligencia emocional

I think these are great fun and could be used in the classroom as a way of presenting information e.g. new vocabulary such as food and drink, things based on popularity when doing likes and dislikes as well as creating visual poems and stories. And how about inputting some text that children have written and graphically showing them how many times the word ‘said’ or ‘went’ appear – that should bring the point home ;o)

So let’s get Wordle-ing!