If you like the image above -- essentially a colorful arrangement of the most frequently used words on this blog -- you can thank Wordle for that. Wordle is a Web-based tool that generates a design from a group of words. You can either type in text of your own or have the tool pull from a particular Web site. The words will vary in size and color; the ones used most frequently in the original text will appear as the largest in the resulting image. These "word clouds" can then be saved using screen capture software.
While it isn't hard to see what makes Wordle fun, I can't say I immediately appreciated how useful it could be in the classroom. A quick search on the Web turned up a number of great ideas, though. My favorite resource so far is a slideshow posted by Jennifer Wagner. In it, she suggests using Wordle to summarize political speeches, reinforce class rules, create unique reports, and correctly display words that are frequently misspelled.
Rodd Lucier of The Clever Sheep shares his top 20 uses, which include converting student essays into posters and creating visual introductions to new themes or chapters. I don't know which to try first.
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