I have seen a number of examples of the excellent Wordle being used within the school. Here are a few links to applications – some of which do a similar thing to Wordle, some are totally different but all may inspire you to think about literacy within your classroom. The following will give you ideas for starters, displays and lots more too.
1. Tagxedo – this is probably better than wordle in that it has more options and allows you to choose a shape for your text. This example is of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address – it took me less than minute to create:
2. Spell with flickr – does exactly what it says – imports images from flicker to create words:
3. Snappywords is a free visual online dictionary.
4. Wordsift – a simple version of Wordle that also is a kind of visual thesaurus – very simple to use
5. Graphwords is another thesaurus that is laid out like a mind-map. You enter a word and the thesaurus ‘explodes’ into a cloud of reflated words – everything is colour coded for nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs. You can easily save the end results as an image by clicking the button at the top.
Learning and Teaching at Abbot Beyne 