Pale Blue Dot
What does wordle do?
Wordle is a tool for producing “word clouds” from text (articles, sonnets, or even documentary evidence,etc.) that you input. The more frequent the word appears, the larger the font size could be. You could tailor your own word clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color choices at will.
How might you use it to foster language learning in class?
In class, it could be used in two ways.
First, we could teach intensive reading by displaying this wordle image to students. As shown above, which I generated by inputting one of my favourite articles (Pale Blue Dot, written by Carl Sagan ), key words or to be specific, theme words come out.We could design tasks, for example, let students predict according to a Wordle picture , suppose they were this article's writer and how they might produce their articles. Obviously, this method could greatly motivate students to understand this article.
On the other hand , we could employ Wordle in anlysing an essay, for instance,a letter, or an academic writing. We could input a model essay in specific genre into Wordle, common words like the, a(an), to,numbers excluded by default, some words and expressions which used frequently in this genre might appear prominently. This way could be more striking and stimulating to your students in teaching them writing an article.
What limitations can you see with the use of this technology?
First, suppose you just store it in public gallery like I did, theoretically, everyone who found it can use it.
Second, Wordle does not support to input ideographic fonts, for example, Chinese!
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