Cool Tool for School!!

How many times have you been completely confused by the theme or tone of a poem, short story, or any other type of literature?  Sometimes it isn't easy to decipher what the author intended.  I've found an AWESOME tool for English teachers to use when teaching these lessons, and teachers of other subjects could definitely find this useful!

wordle.


Basically, wordle is a website that allows you to input text into a box, and produce an image.  The image features commonly used words in the passage--the bigger the word, the more frequently it is used.  This allows students to directly see which words are used the most, and based on these words, students can determine what the author's tone or theme is.

Let's try it out!

1. Go to wordle and click on "create"
2. In a separate tab, open Robert Frost's poem "The Flood"
3. Copy the poem's text and paste it into the large box on the "create" page of wordle
4. Hit "go"
5. Determine Frost's tone based on the words most frequently used

This excercise could be converted into any subject!  The fun of this tool is that students can then save their images to the wordle gallery, and then explore what their classmates created.