Wordle – Beautiful Word Clouds

A cool JAVA applet that works like other applets which create tag clouds from your blog tags. Wordle analyzes a text of yours to yield a word cloud, i.e. with big and well-positioned words that are repeated or used most often in that text of yours. I must say I fell in love with it inmediately. On the one hand, pure aesthetics. Wordle gives you rough control on the cloud appearance, you can modify its layout, colors, fonts, etc. However, you can’t delete words you don’t want to be there. On the other, I find it useful for the learning process. For the language learning process, too: EFL and ELE.

I’d (and I will) recommend this tool for any language learner because it’s a nice tool to let you analyze which words you use most often. Indeed, ours is a field that lacks this sort of visualization tools, so I guess it’s a good idea to come up with educational applications for Wordle. I’d tell you -learners- to copy and paste your compositions, and get your word clouds. You can do this on a regular basis and check if you’re gaining vocab in a nice visual way -I love this, because I’m a visual learner-. I’m teaching an online course in which students have to write weekly tutorials (or written asignments they have to post to their etutor), a tutorial per unit…and I think with Wordle they can create nice lists of key vocab of every unit -because they use it in their assignments-.

More ideas are welcome…

Wishlist: It’d be great if word clouds could also be retrieved from URLs.