Wordle the new technology

"Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends." (Feinberg, 2009)

Instructions to construct your own wordle:

1. Select topic/issue from advised website http://www.heraldsun.com.au/ to be used to teach and engage students about contention.
2. Go to http://www.wordle.net/
3. Select CREATE on wordle then copy and paste your chosen article in box provided.
4. Select GO
5. You can select edit options to indivdualise wordle eg: add more words to manipulate size of words, font and colour
6. Save to public space to access
7. Print or view wordle on laptops

We have created a Wordle on the topic 'Should the Hijab be banned in Australia' using the following article from the Daily Telegraph http://xrl.us/bhk6py (Link to www.dailytelegraph.com.au)

Please click on the following link to view our created Wordle http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/2020316/EET330_issue

Lesson plan:

Introduction:

Introduce students to topic of issues in the media. Students have previously learnt persuasive devices in English in prior lessons. From their knowledge of newspaper articles such as letter to the editor, opinion piece and feature article, students will now look at contention (the main point of an argument). Instead of presenting students with a traditionally written article, they are presented a representation of an article through a 'word cloud'

10min

Body:

1. teacher to explain Wordle activity to students and arrange them into pairs to complete activity
2. give students print out copy of created Wordle (so they have a copy to paste into their workbooks
3. students will work together and collaborate their ideas regarding the word cloud article. They are required to peice together the limited informaiton to formulate the contention of the article
4. after formulating the contention, students will write a short 200 word piece (individually) on what they believe the article is about
5. after writing time teacher will run class discussion to collaborate whole class ideas, writing student's ideas as a mind map (or other visual representation on board)
6. following discussion, teacher reveals contention of article and hands out photocopied original article to students to paste alongside Wordle

50 min

Conclusion:

After students have completed work in pairs, teacher collects student's work book with the finished work which will be marked satisfactory/not satisfactory. Pack up classroom

10 min