Fun With Words

It's our last week of spelling homework so I thought I'd share a favorite website that I was recently reminded of. :)

From the Wordle website: "Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends."

This word cloud was created using the words we collected as we read The Name of This Book is Secret. After you create your own Wordle, you may want to save it. You can print it out right away or save it to their public gallery. Another option is to do a screen capture so that you can save the Wordle as a picture file. There's no way to search for your Wordle so be sure to copy the web address before you move on to something else if you want to be able to find it again.

A fun thing to do with Wordle is to create a word cloud without a title and have a friend try to guess what it is about. Here's an example...

Can you guess what the title is?

(hint: this is something we do in class almost every week)

Wordle is a free website so I have a few cautions about it.

• Occasionally, the site seems to freeze up or otherwise not work. It may be helpful to type your words into a text file (in Word or a similar word processor) and then copy/paste them into Wordle. That way, you won't lose all of the text if you have problems with the website.
• Text on Wordle cannot be removed or censored. It is possible to come across word clouds that have inappropriate words in them - *Parents: see the FAQ section for filtering what your child has access to if you are concerned about this.* I have visited the site many times and haven't seen anything inappropriate yet.
• If you post to the public gallery, be sure that you haven't included anything you don't want shared with the whole world. *Kids - this includes using your whole name and anything that gives information about where you live! Always be safe when you are working online.

If you create a Wordle, please share it with us! It's fun to see what others create and gives us great ideas.