I recently discovered Wordle.net on del.icio.us, and again on Holly’s blog. I commented her post, but after some thought, I decided Wordle is worth it’s own post on here as well.

According to the Wordle site:

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.

Aside from just being a “toy,” this site makes a sure-fire prereading activity – especially for poetry or short stories. For example, a class could prepare for a reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven by viewing a word cloud of the poem. It would be an easy way for the class to identify important vocabulary words and begin making predictions that may help them as they read.

Wordle makes some pretty cool word art as well. Good for bulletin boards and presentations (almost like a visual abstract!), and heck, I even used it to make a new title bar for this blog. I just copied and pasted my first four posts onto the site. Do you like it?