Wordle (or Worldle)

[Sarah Hanawald]

For some reason, I keep typing Worldle instead of Wordle. I did it twice, just trying to write that sentence! Anyway, I don't usually cross-post, but this one really struck me. One of the benefits of technology is providing teachers and students with ways to do something that they wouldn't be able to do otherwise. Would you ever have students count/tally the individual words in a newspaper article? Probably not, but it provides food for thought, especially when the results are displayed visually. This is particularly striking when the topic is laden with politics, emotions, or other strong feelings. There's a new (to me) website, Wordle, that does something interesting with written text:

Our diversity director sent out two different articles written about the the U.S. House of Representatives issuing an apology for slavery and for Jim Crow. His point was that the articles were different in subtle but important ways (for example, look for the word primary in both images). I had heard about Wordle, which makes the images basedb on the frequency with which words appear in the article. So, I made images of the two articles. The first article was written by Darryl Fears and appeared in the Washington Post. Here's the Wordle for that article.



The second article was written by Jim Abrams for the Associated Press and distributed widely. Here's the Wordle for it.


I left out the headlines for both because those are seldom written by the journalists who write the articles.
Discussion fodder in conjunction with reading the articles? I think so.

Wouldn't it be interesting to have students create something similar with two pieces, either historical, literary, or current?

[Sarah Hanawald]

Thanks Brian! Good to see you here. Have you joined Classroom2.0? I love teaching middle school--there's so much more room to innovate. Does SC have a technology conference? If not, do you think you might come to the NC one? . It's sort of hit or miss, but since it is in Greensboro, I usually go.

[Brian Brumley]

Sarah

This is AWESOME stuff...my department head, Doug, is already doing stuff like this with his upper school students. He is also into social networking throught ning BIG time. I am going to start introducing things like this to my middle school students as well. We are in the process of taking our Computer Science curriculum to a whole new level.