Wordle: Words as an image

This month's NEA Higher Education Advocate featured a short bit about using "tag clouds" or "word clouds" as a way to visualize text, especially a student's own writing. In Best Practices: Words as Images the authors describe the use of Wordle, which creates an image of pasted text in which the size of each word is proportional to the amount its used in the text. Using them can help students see the primary themes or topics they use--perhaps in order to focus or refocus their writing. I'm looking forward to using this in Research Methods literature reviews--my students often struggle with recognizing the major themes and flit from topic to topic and back again. Perhaps this will help some of them focus and recognize areas they need to spend more time on.

Here is the Wordle I created from the Course Development Grant RFP (select the picture to it larger at Wordle):


Perhaps "technology" should feature a bit more in such a grant request?

Here is the US Constitution:


The applet has many options for font, color, arrangement, number of words, etc. You can't save the image except by publishing it to their public gallery, although you can print without publishing. (You could save it by doing a screenshot as well.)

Possible uses:

• Assess the student's own writing
• Compare and contrast two texts
• Compare and contrast related news articles from different publication
• Analyze course notes
• Create a study guide
• Create art
• Analyze a speech
• Create a visual display of important course topics (you can force words to be smaller or larger either by entering them more or using advanced techniques)
• Find more ideas at Top 20 Uses for Wordle or by searching for "educational uses for Wordle" or "educational uses for word clouds"