Friday 3 February 2012

How to apply wordle to our teaching

To access wordle, click here->WORDLE


Brief Introduction of Wordle:


On the official website, Wordle is defined as a “toy for generating word clouds”. Wordle is useful for:
  • gathering and collecting ideas
  • making vocab exercise less boring
  • highlighting the key points in a conference
  • greeting with more visual aids
  • depicting creativity and novelty



How to create a Wordle

In general, wordle is very user-friendly, except the fact java needs to be installed before it's available.In terms of the detailed operating steps, we can take a look at this:
  1. Steps to create your own wordle

Also,a lot of customization is possible with wordle, be it the change of font or choice of color. All this can be accomplished with the buttons on the top.

As to how this fascinating website can be adopted to my future teaching, I also have some interesting ideas.Since I plan to be a teacher specializing in IELTS and TOEFL, it should be very helpful with the writing class. For intance, I can select the sample compositions written by the examiners and transform them into wordles. The most frequent words, in other words, the words with the biggest size in the pictures would be most obvious and salient on the screen. In fact,those are the ones students should really bear in mind and try to employ themselves in their future writing. It is advisable to draw lessons from the examiners' writing style and word choices. Moreover, by looking at the colorful wordle pictures, the classroom atmosphere would be definitely liven up a bit.

Another possible proposal here:
If the student finds one particular article difficult to understand, he can "wordle" it and try to figure out the new words that appear most frequently in that text. This might help him better understand the meaning as well as capture the gist of the text..

One more proposal according to Max:
Try it with the listening practice: Before listening, wordle the text and show the picture to the students, asking them to make up their own versions of stories independently firstly. In this case, their schemata will be already activated when they listen to the actual text and the listening exercise stands to be more interesting and to some extent, encouraging to the students.

In conclusion, with wordle, vocabulary is so much more than a mere torturing and painstaking exercise. Everyone can have his or her own wordle and make the best use of it.

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