Since Wordle is the website( http://www.wordle.net/) that originally inspired me with the idea of this blog, it is only fitting that it be the subject of my first post.

Wordle is a program which takes any amount of text that you put into it, tallies how often each major word (so, not words like "the," "for," "it") appears, and then creates a "cloud" of the words in the text. The words are displayed so that the size of the word correlates to how often it appears. You can change the colors, fonts, and other appearances of your cloud.

You may be asking yourself, what educational applications does this awesomeness have? The teacher who first showed me Wordle used it as a social emotional exercise for her students. Each student in her class chose an adjective from a list to describe each of their other classmates. A word cloud was created from the adjectives used to describe each student. The students predicted what adjectives would be used to describe them and then compared their predictions to their word cloud.

Another potential application would be to input the text from a book into Wordle and then use the word cloud to generate student predictions about the text based on the most frequent words. Here is the word cloud for a rendition of The Lion and the Mouse:

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/1880354/Lion_and_the_Mouse

As I'm sure you're beginning to see, the possibilities are ENDLESS. Enjoy!