eTech Ohio 2010: After Thoughts Part Three
Dear Folks,
Wordle… I’ve known about Wordle (http://www.wordle.net) for more than a year. I thought that the word clouds were pretty.
Yup, that’s the limit of thought I gave to this wonderful resource. It wasn’t until after I’d seen it used effectively at eTech Ohio by a number of presenters that I started thinking it might be a good teaching tool to use with my students.
Since we have been studying about being a “Communicator” as our school moves towards IB recognition, I thought Wordle might be a useful tool to help second graders learn about communication.
Over a period of days, I gathered transcripts of President Obama’s speech about race (given while running for president), his September speech to students, and Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. It was very easy to copy and past the text into Wordle and let the default settings produce a word cloud for me.
The word clouds were put into SMART Notebook presentations along with video of the speeches.
The result with the kids was more than I’d hoped for. We’d listen only to parts of the speeches (Normal 7 and 8 year olds are not fond of 37 minute speeches. They’re like the carnival arcade ”Whac-a-Mole’ game after the first few minutes.) Periodically, I’d stop the video and then switch to the word cloud. The kids quickly made connections between what they heard and what they saw in the word cloud. They eagerly went looking for words by size and understood that the big words were the “big ideas” of the speech. They asked questions about the words in the cloud that showed a sophistication of thought that I hadn’t seen very often. I have to admit that these were pretty cool moments in the classroom. I found that the kids were more interested in listening to more of these long speeches after looking at the clouds.
I spent a lot of time playing around with the settings and came up with some ideas on making more effective word clouds:
- Change the number of words to suit your needs. Lowering the default setting of 150 words creates more focused word clouds where the “Big Ideas” stand out. For second graders 50-75 words in a long speech like Obama’s 37 minute speech on race seemed to be just about right. Too few words and you begin to lose the ideas the speaker was trying to communicate.
- Play around with the color format. My favorite setting is the Red, Green, Blue/Black background style. Dynamite on a computer monitor. Not so great on an Interactive white board because LCD projectors have trouble with true black and because the ambient light in a classroom washes out the color. The vivid blue actually is hard to read from 10 feet away. The lighter background color styles actually look better in a big classroom. In my spare time, I think I’ll try creating my own style color palette.
- Get a good screen capture tool and copy the Wordle word cloud from the screen. Going through the process of saving the word clouds, I never liked the resolution of the resulting jpeg. The letters were not crisp and were sometimes jagged. Snagit 9 is what I use for screen captures. It did a perfect job that turned out to be just the right size for putting into a SMART Notebook presentation.
eTech Ohio 2010 was a nice break for me. It exposed me to new ideas and new ways to do things. It allowed me to rethink some of the things I do 0r don’t do, and did a nice job thawing that mid-school year ice damn that seems to hit in February. I’ve only scraped the surface of the things I challenged myself to try out. With the successes I’ve had trying out just a few things, I’m lookng forward to more experimentation and excitement over the next several weeks.
Yours,
Lee
