Sunday, November 30, 2008

Wordle in the Classroom

Wordle is a web-based program allowing one to make word clouds easily and with and lots of opportunity to modify color, text, and design. See my post of November 28 for a sample. It's fun. Is it appropriate for my classrooms (elementary school)? Wordle doesn't think so, and neither do I. Here's what's posted on the Wordle site:
"Wordle, as it stands, is inappropriate for classroom use. This is because I do not censor the content that appears on Wordle (I couldn't possibly; there are thousands a week), and, therefore, it's possible to find images in the public gallery that are entirely unsuitable for younger users. I regret this, and hope to address it some day, but that's how it is for now"

The problem for my classroom is that one automatically views the latest Wordle creations by others. Not all those are appropriate for the classroom.

1 comment:

Julie Spang said...

Check out one of my reecent posts in my blog...http://webtwo0.blogspot.com/2008/12/highs-and-lows-of-technology.html
You may want to try Tagcrowd.com instead. It produces word clouds to print or embed and does not display other people's work.