Word clouds are appealing and can be useful as well, thanks to Wordle!

Wordle can help us turn texts into word clouds. We can do this very easily and quickly simply by visiting http://www.wordle.net. The site is free and no membership or account is required. Once, we are on the page we can click on the "Create" button and then a box appears where we can paste any text we have already copied or type words, sentences or text (Image 1). Then we click on the "Go" button and a word cloud is created instanlty (Image 2). The site requires the Java programme which can be downloaded very easily.

Image 1

Image 2

How does Wordle work?

What Wordle does is to create word clouds by distributing the words randomly all around. The more frequently a word occurs in our texts the larger it appears in our word cloud. Look for example at the above word cloud. The text I have typed is: "Look at the dog named George barking and jumping all around. How silly is George the dog. " The most frequent words are "George", "dog" and "the" which appear larger in contrast to the other words.

Why does Wordle stand out from the other web tools which allow us to create word clouds?

Wordle is special because it is easily costumisable. Once we created the word cloud there are four categories: language, font, layout and colour which can help us recreate our cloud according to our teaching aims. Below you can find some of the most important choices offered in each category which can make our lives easier.
Language: I believe that the choices make all words lower case, make all the words upper case, guess case for each word, remove common words can permit us to create appropriate clouds so that we can ask our students to either indicate which words should be written with capital letters and which with small letters or in cases we have removed the common words (which are usually functional words like the, in, and etc) we can ask them to recreate the sentences.
Layout: Choices like all horizontal and any which way can make our word clouds easily to be read or suitable for tasks where our students have to categorize the words in it respectively.
Colour: Apart from the colour options offered we can easily costumise colours so that for example we can choose a nude colour for the majority of the words and intense ones for the words we want to stress.

Other important tips

Right click on a word can delete it from the word cloud.
When we create or paste a text we can keep words connected simple by using a tilde between them.

Finally, we can either print our clouds or by clicking on "Print " we can choose to save them as PDF files. Another option is to save our cloud by clicking on "Publish to Gallery" (there are many already made word clouds there available for us to use) then copying the embed code assigned to our cloud if we want to embed it on a web page.

Ideas for classroom practice

First days of class

• We can ask our students to use adjectives or/and nouns (including toponyms) to describe England or their school.
• We can ask them to use adjectives and describe how they want their teacher to be. We can also create a similar word cloud.
• They can make word clouds with their expectations from our lessons or refer to their learning difficulties (grammar, past tense, speaking, prepositions).

Most of us tend to ask lots of these orally but now we can use Wordle for a change and make our lessons more interesting and colourful. Students will be more engaged and will get to create something of their own from the very first day. We can use these word clouds as posters to decorate our classrooms. In addition, in our first days we usually have plenty of time so we can give our students the time to explore Wordle.

Reading skills

• Wordle can help us do pre-reading activities. We can make a word cloud with difficult words including in the following reading exercise and ask them to predict their meaning. Something else that we can do is to make a word cloud with the whole following text and ask them to tell us (predicting from the most common words) what they think the text will be about. Finally, we can make word clouds with words summarising the main ideas of the following text and ask our students to brainstorm and talk about these.
• We can also do some post reading activities focusing on the vocabulary and grammar of the text. For example, we can ask our students to make clouds with the words they do not know or with difficult words. They can make clouds with synonyms or antonyms of particular words in the text or find the compound words, collocations, motion verbs, regular or irregular verbs, cohesion words. Our students can make sentences with the above as homework.
• They can work in groups and use the most common words of the text to make a story

Writing skills

• We can give our students two word clouds generated by texts on the same topic but the first will be formal and the second informal. This is a way to make them realise the different writing styles by actually letting them discovering the distinguishing features by themselves.
• We can give them essays that other students have produced and ask them to compare these. They might find spelling mistakes or grammar mistakes, repeated words, limited vocabulary etc.
• Our students can also work in groups and brainstorm on the topic of the essay.

Vocabulary

• We can make a revision on the vocabulary. After each chapter they can work in groups and make word clouds with words they have learnt and liked the most. We can use these word clouds to decorate our classrooms and as a reminder of what they have achieved.
• We can have them match words, find collocations. For example, we can type everyday habitual activities like take a shower, brush my teeth etc and ask them to match them.
• We can give them a new word and make clouds with every word they associate with it (Image 3).

Image 3

Grammar

• We can use Wordle to make a revision or to present new grammatical points. For example, we can create a word cloud with sentences including "used to + infinitive" and "I am getting used to + gerund" and ask our students to recreate these (Image 4).

Image 4

Special occasions

• Our students can make word clouds with happy birthday wishes when one of their classmates has his birthday.
• They can make clouds to describe Christmas or Easter.

Some limitations to bear in mind

The main problem is that we can not edit the word clouds once they had been created. Our word clouds will be lost if we try to refresh the page or return back to the box. So we will have to rewrite the text or paste it again! This can be very frustrating and very time consuming so we need to warn our students about this and keep reminding this to ourselves.

Why I do suggest Wordle

Wordle can be very appealing which can make our students willing to participate. In addition, it can help students who have a visual learning style and others who love collaborating with each other. Moreover, our activities will be more memorable since students will be more engaged and creative. It is also important to remember that to generate a word cloud once you have come up with the words takes not even a second! So let's give our students this time to produce word clouds, I am sure that they will love it!

Printscreens from Wordle