Wordle - a cloud of meaning

    The above cloud-like picture is created by using Wordle, one of the most popular word-cloud tools. It provides an instant overview of the content of this blog, by making bigger more frequent words appeared on previous blog posts. Such visual representation of texts can bring us some useful ideas and great fun in language teaching activities.

People fancy visual elements and are more easily to be motivated. Word cloud is not the kind of images that bring direct emotional impacts and get people moved though, it conveys and reveals meaning of texts in an economical and direct way that is impossible to be realised by sole text information. Taking the word cloud above as an example, a glance at the words can get the idea that this blog is themed as language teaching and learning and students are for whatever reason highly emphasised. The appearance of the words such as podcast, TodaysMeet, Voki, cartoon, video indicate that there may be a focus on using ICT in language teaching (due to the fact that it is created based on only five previous posts, the ICT feature reflected by it may not be salient enough). Some may notice the Label that appears on the right of this blog page is also in a cloud style, which makes salient the topics that are more talked about. When there are huge amount of posts produced here, its powerfulness will show.

Implementation in language teaching activities 

1. Make the key words or the whole text that students are going to learn a Wordle cloud, so that students can guess discuss what they will be learning. It is a smooth way to lead in and get students motivated. 

2. Using word cloud at the beginning of a lesson or pre-task activities can also be a good way to test their language proficiency, by finding out which key words that are going to be used in the tasks are still unknown to them, and scaffold their language learning.

3. It can also be used before a reading task to encourage students to predict the main topic of the article. Moreover, for example, you can even choose the main characters, their personalities, locations, specific events from a story make a Wordle cloud and have students match relative words together during the reading tasks.

4. It can also be used to review new vocabularies just learned before the end of the lesson.

Click the Wordle link and have a go: http://www.wordle.net

One problem

Although Wordle has the function to automatically eliminate words like “and” and “the” (and equivalent common words in the other languages it supports), as well as numbers, but you may have other unwanted words that need to be eliminated.

Important Note: 

1. Go to the website and click 'Create', you can either paste/type in the text, or just enter the URL link of any blog, blog feed or the link of webpage that has Atom or RSS feed.

2. You can change the style (font, colour, horizontal/vertical layout of words, etc.)

3. To save and use your cloud images, make a screencast of it and save into your computer.

Mac OS can press Command+Shift+3/4 to make a screencast, Windows PC click screencast button.
For free screencast software: Jing is recommended: http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html