Resources for Educators

Teaching Tip

From the Teacher’s Aide Newsletter

2011 October

The Joys of Wordle

I recently discovered the Wordle application at the afmte conference in August 2011. We used it during the closing ceremony. Every person shared a word that summed up their experience of the conference. The words were entered into a computer and then uploaded to the Wordle site to create a stunning visual representation of our thoughts. I posted it in the September Teacher’s Aide. I’ve been experimenting with it and am having fun. I have copied chapter 17 of Business Mastery into Wordle and you can see how it appears below. I plan to do this for all the chapters of my books and make PowerPoint^® slides.

You can limit the number of words you want included, and once it’s done you can remove words that you don’t want, (e.g., “the,” “and,” “of”). You can also adjust the font, layout and color scheme. You could do this with course materials as an introduction to a course or a summary. Another idea is to have each person in class submit 3-5 words that depict the most important concepts they learned in a specific module.

Create the Wordle and have a short class discussion about it (e.g., which words had more impact, was anything left out).