Wordle

**What's Wordle?**



Wordle

In short, Wordle is a Web 2.0 toy. Wordle creates graphic representations of words. All you need to do is plug in the words, push a button, and voila! Wordle creates a nifty display of your words. Those of you who made it to the post-core planning meeting in the theater with Ed and Deb on April 28 saw a graphic of many words that were tossed around during the discussions about the new mission statement and so on. Someone cleverly put those words together on Wordle.

 How can you use Wordle? The sky's the limit. Students can use Wordle to create representations of new vocabulary words. Sure, the representations can help during the **exposure phase** of teaching students new vocabulary. In this way, Wordle could help students become better acquainted with the words--at least in the beginning. You might use Wordle to display key terms in your classroom as part of a **word wall look-alike display.** Worldle can also be used to keep track of **themes.**

 **Question**: How does one save a Wordle word cloud so it can embedded into a wiki, blog or Web site?

 **Answer:** Save it as a JPEG (MAC)  Use the Screen Capture function
 * Hold down the SHIFT CMD and 4 keys at the same time
 * Guide the crosshair over the Wordle image and let go of all the keys
 * You'll find the image on your desktop. Most likely it will be called Picture-#

 Save it as a JPEG (Windows) Use the Print Screen function
 * Hit the PRINT SCREEN key
 * Use the crop tool to adjust the size of the image to capture only the Wordle cloud
 * Save the image as a JPEG file

 Upload the image to a host (MAC and Windows)
 *  Now that you have a JPEG file, upload the file to Flickr
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 130%;"> Right-click on the uploaded image
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 130%;"> Go to PROPERTIES-->LOCATION
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 130%;"> Highlight & copy the URL (e.g. address) under the image
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 130%;"> Insert the URL into your wiki, Web site or blog