Tagxedo: Wordle, only more so

Tagxedo does Wordle one better, allowing users to apply shapes to their word clouds.  Here, I've put the Gettysburg Address into a dove shape (the quotation balloon shape didn't look very good).  It includes all the usual tools for designing your cloud--color, orientation, etc.

In addition, Tagxedo has kind of a cool feature when it's online.  Hover your pointer over a word, and it "pops up," highlighted.  Good for concept discussion.  In its current Beta version, it even allows you to upload your own shape, though it looks like that will become a pro feature eventually.

Wordle-Obsessed

I blogged about Wordle during a conference last night. It's an interesting gadget, but at the time I didn't think it had much educational use, thought I tossed off a few possibilities.

Well, I'm hooked. I played with it this morning and created a cloud using several poems by my favorite poet, Emily Dickinson. Here's the result:

Wow, what a tool for evaluating themes/ideas in writing. And the results are almost as visually poetic as the original. Wordle allows you to edit for color, arrangement, number of words to display and font. I shared it with our creative writing teacher, who now want to use it with his classes.

Then Leslie shared this tool. It makes word clouds of all the presidential speeches (use the slider across the top). Very insightful, and more immediately accessible to discuss ideology than reading all the speeches. Not that that's a bad thing, but this could provide an instant analysis across the decades to show shifts in foreign and domestic policy.

Wordle

Here's a new Web 2.0 tool. Wordle takes text you input and creates a word image based on frequency (similar to a cloud). Here's one I created based on a few of my blog posts.


Cool, but I was wondering how in the world you could use this in class. A few possibilities: Word poems. Analyzing text (others or your own) for key words/themes. For example, input a politician's speech and see what turns up--it could add an interesting element to a presentation.