"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 your own desktop to use as you wish."
This is the text that appears on Wordle's home screen and I found it to be a very concise summary. This is a new tool for me so before going to the website I actually had no idea what a word cloud was.
The very first thing I found when trying to create my first word cloud was that the Chrome web browser no longer supports NPAPI plugins because they are outdated and can cause security risks. NPAPI plugins are Silverlight, Java, and Unity, however Flash is a PPAPI plugin and is still compatible with Chrome.
I proceeded to open Wordle in Firefox, and I was successful in creating a word cloud but only after recieving many dialog boxes asking for different permissions.
At this point I would say Wordle is not worth the hassle, and if you were trying to have students use it for a project the issues would probably be far more involved. I feel that if I were a teacher asking students to use this I would waste valuable class time trouble shooting all the problems. I would only have students reference this as an optional resource, possibly giving a chance for bonus points if a word cloud is used. The probable issues that would be encountered and the fact that I find word clouds to not have much purpose makes this tool not worth the time.
Over all the website was easy to navigate, and the word cloud was easy to create. I used the text from a reflection paper I wrote in response to the F. A. T. City Workshop video I watched for my Intro to Exceptionalities course. This is the word cloud I created:
Okay. As I was trying to upload this image, I ran into the issue that the type of file the image is downloaded from Worlde as is not recognized by my computer. I was able to open the file but I had to choose the application I would use to open the file with. I chose windows multi media viewer. I was not able to upload the file to Blogger because the unknown file type was not recognized even though the website says it will be saved as a PNG, so I had to open the image and save a copy of it as a JPEG, and then I was able to upload it to this post.
While the steps on Worlde are fairly simple to follow, and students could definitely create their own digital media artifacts, what I went through makes me say that I would not try to use this in the classroom.The very first thing I found when trying to create my first word cloud was that the Chrome web browser no longer supports NPAPI plugins because they are outdated and can cause security risks. NPAPI plugins are Silverlight, Java, and Unity, however Flash is a PPAPI plugin and is still compatible with Chrome.
I proceeded to open Wordle in Firefox, and I was successful in creating a word cloud but only after recieving many dialog boxes asking for different permissions.
At this point I would say Wordle is not worth the hassle, and if you were trying to have students use it for a project the issues would probably be far more involved. I feel that if I were a teacher asking students to use this I would waste valuable class time trouble shooting all the problems. I would only have students reference this as an optional resource, possibly giving a chance for bonus points if a word cloud is used. The probable issues that would be encountered and the fact that I find word clouds to not have much purpose makes this tool not worth the time.
Over all the website was easy to navigate, and the word cloud was easy to create. I used the text from a reflection paper I wrote in response to the F. A. T. City Workshop video I watched for my Intro to Exceptionalities course. This is the word cloud I created:
Okay. As I was trying to upload this image, I ran into the issue that the type of file the image is downloaded from Worlde as is not recognized by my computer. I was able to open the file but I had to choose the application I would use to open the file with. I chose windows multi media viewer. I was not able to upload the file to Blogger because the unknown file type was not recognized even though the website says it will be saved as a PNG, so I had to open the image and save a copy of it as a JPEG, and then I was able to upload it to this post.
When I think back to what I learned in this week's lesson, in the TPACK model this application would not be a very fluid way to integrate technology in to teaching methods or a very informational way of presenting content.
Below is the TPACK model I was shown during the lesson.
I would give this application 1/5 stars, and would not recommend it to teachers or students.
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