Wordle-Obsessed

I blogged about Wordle during a conference last night. It's an interesting gadget, but at the time I didn't think it had much educational use, thought I tossed off a few possibilities.

Well, I'm hooked. I played with it this morning and created a cloud using several poems by my favorite poet, Emily Dickinson. Here's the result:

Wow, what a tool for evaluating themes/ideas in writing. And the results are almost as visually poetic as the original. Wordle allows you to edit for color, arrangement, number of words to display and font. I shared it with our creative writing teacher, who now want to use it with his classes.

Then Leslie shared this tool. It makes word clouds of all the presidential speeches (use the slider across the top). Very insightful, and more immediately accessible to discuss ideology than reading all the speeches. Not that that's a bad thing, but this could provide an instant analysis across the decades to show shifts in foreign and domestic policy.