Form Tools

Wordle http://www.wordle.net/

That stylish and attractive artifact is consist of words from text.  Original simple text can change into the briliant art.  Wordle is an application that creates Word Clouds (pictures made of words). That "Word Clouds" shows the text for explaining "wordle" cited from the homepage, and the origin is as follows;

"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."

The feature

• If text is put in the box, "word clouds" is created automatically. Easy and simple.
• Most frequently used word show up the largest.
• Right click on a word removes the word.
• Many option :  remove common words or not, make all words lower-case/upper-case, many kinds of fonts and layout.       

  
                    

 How to use "wordle" in a classroom --- My suggestion.

Predicting a text

I make a Wordle from some paragraphs of a textbook and ask students guess the content of it. For target vocabulary to be displayed larger, it is written repeatedly.  

Guess and compare
I show the Wordle which explains something such as a baseball team, an amusement park, or a movie. Students guess what is explained by the Wordle. Or students compare two Wordle, each of which describes each category; for example, A is for Disney Land and B is for Hollywood Studio.

Focus specific words
I or students put in Wordle some text with unique characteristics such as part of the biography
of a famous person. We study if there are some peculiar words and discuss them

Making a descriptive sentence
Students make a descriptive sentence by picking up the words from Wordle and replace them.

( Question )

Make a proper sentence by using the words in Wordle. You can use the same word more than once. Pay attention to large words.

( Answer )

We get more than ten years of English in junior high school, high school,and a college. So why are we still unable to speak it?

WordSift   http://www.wordsift.com/

When we put text in the box, the 50 most frequently used words in the text are displayed at random. Then we can change the display order, for example, in 'common to rare', 'rare to common', 'A to Z' or 'Z to A' order. That is an example of 'common to rare' order. Frequently used words in a text are displayed larger.

In addition to that, when click 'AWL(Academic Words List)' under the box. The words concerning academic are displayed in red. We can choose other categories like 'GSL(General Science Language)', 'Math', 'Science', and so on.

Google gives us images & videos which help us capture the meaning of the selected word. Moreover, 'Visual Thesaurus' is presented and show us the related words.

At the bottom, there is 

 'Examples form Source'

The sentences in which the selected word is used are shown.  The selected word is displayed in green such as 'species'.

Source from:  
Wordsift Homepage - Sample Text: Darwin & evolution.  http://www.wordsift.com/

How to use "WordSift" in a classroom --- My suggestion.

Predict a text

By identifying large words, we can predict the content of a passage. It may be a kind of skimming of the content. Therefore, it is helpful to check some large words before reading a long text. If students do not know the meaning of the words exactly, they can guess it by referring to images, videos, thesaurus, and examples. By skimming the passage, students can understand the main idea or theme of it in advance.

Vocabulary Exercise 

On the basis of 'Visual Thesaurus', students study how the words are related. Antonym and synonym can be introduced at this point.


Making a presentation board
'Work Space' is a good space where images or words we like can be dragged and dropped. Students can collect some suitable words and images there, and create a presentation board for summary of the passage. By using that board, students speak the summary in class.

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The crux

In a classroom, it may be the best to present those webpages on a large screen and operate 'wordle' or 'WordSift' flexibly while discussing with students. However, such a situation is not always possible due to the deficiency of technical facilities in a classroom. In that case, teachers must copy the 'wordle' or 'WordSift' and hand them out to the students, which may sometimes deprive the students of a exciting feeling.

Google images & videos in 'WordSift' is very helpful for students to understand the word's meaning especially in case of noun or adjective. However, in case of verb or adverb, students find it difficult to grasp the meaning.