PhotoGrab High Frequency Word Game

I watched a TED.com video by Scott Kim, a master puzzle designer. At the end of the video, he discusses Shufflebrain, an online tool that combines social networking with puzzles. It allows you to make your own puzzles out of pictures that you have on Facebook or Flickr.

I will include Kim's TED talk below, but I want to show you the puzzle I created first. (I am very excited about this!!)

How cool is that? I made pictures of some of the 100 most frequently-used words using Wordle.net, I uploaded them to Flickr, and I created the puzzle using Shufflebrain. The entire process took about a half hour, and this was just the first time.

I think this game could have tons of value for students. Anything that compels them to recall part of letters and words is useful. I will definitely be refining my technique and posting more puzzles in the future.

Here is Kim's TED talk:

Web Resource: Word Sift

Word Sift (wordsift.com) is a web resource designed to help students interact with texts. In the words of its creators, Kenji Hakuta and Greg Wientjes, it is "a toy in a linguistic playground that is available to instantly capture and display the vocabulary structure of texts, and to help create an opportunity to talk and play with language."

The folks at Word Sift have combined the magic of word clouds with search engines and an online thesaurus. A student can enter a piece of text and instantly see the most frequently used words in a word cloud. Then, they can use an interactive dictionary/thesaurus (from Visual Thesaurus) to explore the meaning of those words. They can also see pictures generated by Google's image search engine and find out where the words are located in their text.

For example, let's say we want our students to analyze President Obama's Inaugural Address. We paste the text into Word Sift and we see a word cloud like this:



As in most word clouds, the bigger the word, the more times it was used in the text. We can click on any word to explore it further. Let's try "people." Below the word cloud, we see Google image search results like this:



To the right, we see an interactive thesaurus/dictionary with connections to related concepts:



And finally, we see our word in the context of our original text. We can click on any of these sentences to see where they are located in the text.



This site could be useful to teachers in lots of ways. I will let you know how it works when I try it out. For the time being, Word Sift's demo page has some ideas. Let me know if you do too!

Brainstorming with Wordle

Here's another installment in what is becoming a series on the use of word clouds in the classroom.

I was delivering a practice lesson to a class of graduate students in secondary education about push and pull factors in Geography. Basically, a push factor is something that makes you want to leave a place and a pull factor is something that attracts you to someplace else.

After our warm-up and my initial introduction to the concepts, I thought it might be useful to ask my students to contribute examples. Since I have become obsessed with Wordle.net, I thought I'd try to use as a way for the class to visualize the results of our brainstorming. Here are the results:





In a Wordle graphic, a word gets bigger the more times it appears in the text you enter. So for push factors, I started by typing in "push" and "factors" many times to make them much larger than the other words. Then, I just typed in the students' examples as they shouted them out.

The result is a word cloud that depicts our brainstorming session. This can be used as a guide for further in-class discussion or for later review by the students. If I had a class website, I could put the word clouds up for test prep.

I have begun to use Wordle.net with all kinds of students, and they are uniformly fascinated by the results. When brainstorming is used in class, the results are typically either scribbled on the board or left to drift out the window. The students in this class were presented with an eye-catching, reusable picture of our discussion moments after it happened.

Here's a link to the results of my experimentation with Wordle.net. Let me know if you find new ways to use it in the classroom!

More Fun With Wordle - Submissions Needed!

Wordle.net is place where users can create free, eye-catching word clouds. On Feb. 11, I wrote about how word clouds could be used as a literacy aid. I'd love to hear your ideas on how Wordle could be used in the classroom!

I recently introduced Literacy Log to a class full of future ESL teachers, and word clouds seemed to generate the most excitement. I thought it might be a good idea to feature them once again. So, here are some word clouds depicting documents in a few different languages.

Literacy Log officially guarantees that you will enjoy playing around on Wordle. Send me a link you your creation and I'll feature it here!

• A speech by Eva Peron on May 4, 1950. (Original Document)
  

• The Beginning of Voltaire's "Candide." (Original Document)

• Chapter 1 of Marx's "Communist Manifesto." (Original Document)
  

• Story about a bombing (I think) on Al Jazeera. (Original Document)
  

• The Gettysburg Address (Original Document)
  

• All of Literacy Log's February Content (Original Document)
  

4/5/09 Update: Wade Roush at Xconomy interviews the creator of Wordle, John Feinberg.

...you get not only a picture of the relative frequency of words but you can get happy random juxtapositions of words that are conducive to associative thinking. It's generating ideas about something that otherwise wouldn't have occured to you. It's like a data toy. -John Feinberg


Brenda Dyck at Education World writes about potential classroom uses for Wordle. Highly recommended!

Web Resource: Word Clouds

A word cloud is a visual depiction of the main words and ideas of a text. Word clouds evolved from Tag Clouds, which are commonly used to depict the content of websites.

Wordle.net is a free (and addictive) way to create Word Clouds. A teacher or student simply needs to copy and paste text, select font and display preferences, and Wordle generates a word cloud. Here are some examples:

• The Declaration of Independence
• NCSS's National Standards for Social Studies Teachers
• This blog entry

This fantastic interactive page from The New York Times uses world clouds to guide readers through every inaugural address by a U.S. President.

Word clouds are no substitute for the actual reading of a text, but they can provide a powerful visual preview of text and aid students in making predictions and forming questions.