Using Wor­dle in Schools

“The idea of cre­at­ing Tag clouds is not new or unique but the Wor­dle appli­ca­tion offers those in schools with a uniquely visual way to view and/or analyse some text. It is very sim­ple to use and the results are cre­ated quickly. The style can be changed eas­ily, if required, and eas­ily saved.…

We used this aspect in the library this week when we made a Wor­dle using a num­ber of lists of banned books. The authors, the titles and types of books were entered into the text box. Over­whelm­ingly the word ‘novel’ stood out. A sec­ond Wor­dle on banned authors had William Shake­speare and George Orwell as the stand­outs. This could form part of a greater dis­cus­sion about the rea­son for this and we intend to give the issues of banned books and cen­sor­ship a wider focus at a later date, per­haps as part of Social Jus­tice Week, run at our school each year.

We are also using Wor­dles as the basis for one of the com­pe­ti­tions for Book Week. We cre­ated Wor­dles of syn­opses of var­i­ous well known books (tak­ing out any ref­er­ences too unique to the book) and printed out copies. One of the library staff mem­bers had fun play­ing with the colours and for­mats. We did one for ‘Bryan Strauchan: my story’ and made it black and white. (Bryan Strauchan is a fic­tional char­ac­ter who plays for a foot­ball team that hap­pens to have team colours of black and white.) Another book involv­ing ani­mals was done mak­ing the Wor­dle resem­ble tiger stripes. The Wor­dles look great lam­i­nated and I will also be putting up dig­i­tal ver­sions on the library web­site.” [Rhondda’s Reflec­tions — Wan­der­ing around the Web]

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