I just learned of this free tool from an article on the blog Remote Access called ‘Ending the Year with Wordle’ The Java-based applet will take a string of text, or any website with RSS or Atom feed, and generate a word cloud that can be customized to some extent. Just out of curiosity, I let it make a word cloud from this blog – since most of my entries at this point discuss my experiences at NECC last week, I was curiously encouraged by what it came up with.
But at the same time, I was surprised. While the words that it emphasized were ones that I am sure I used many times, it also picked up words that I know I only used in one post in the entire blog – still, I think my Language Arts teachers could enjoy using this tool to start some class discussions sometime.
I came back later and tried putting the Declaration of Independence into a wordle to make a cloud – here was the result. You may want to click on the picture to get a larger version – there are 300 words in there. You think that could start some discussions in a U.S. History class?
Or better yet, the Preamble to the Constitution
