Thursday, October 28, 2010

Creating Word Clouds

I just came across Wordle for creating word clouds out of a text source. It's very neat, flexible, and free. As an example, I took a chapter for a book I wrote on authentic assessment and pasted it into the Wordle input. Here's the result.


This could be used with program plans or reports, curriculum maps, or other input sources to create attention-getters that also have some content--the larger words are the ones most frequent in the source.

You can change fonts, colors, formating, and even eliminate words (by clicking on them) to adjust the output.

I created another one on the blog for my novel that you can see here. For that I took an entire novella and pasted it into the input.
at
Labels: ,

2 comments:

  1. rapsc7:25 PM

    David -- my daughter ( middle school English teacher0 introduced me to this and I am waiting for the opportunity to use it. You have given some good ideas for use.

    ReplyDelete
  2. dave7:31 PM

    Thanks for the note! Please share when you get a cool design.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)
  • Why the Student/Faculty Ratio is a Bad Metric
    The student/faculty ratio, which represents on average how many students there are for each faculty member, is a common metric of educationa...
  • A Canticle for Bloom*
    Introduction Stephen Jay Gould promoted the idea of non-overlaping magisteria , or ways of knowing the world that can be separated into mutu...
  • Why Discount Rates Only Go Up
    The annual NACUBO report on tuition discounts was covered in Inside Higher Ed back in April, including a figure showing historical rates. (...
  • The Well Intentioned Commissar
    (A parable for academic workers and those who direct their activities) by David W. Kammler, Professor Mathematics Department Southern Illino...
  • Teaching Critical Thinking
    I just came across a 2007 article by Daniel T. Willingham " Critical Thinking: Why is it so hard to teach? " Critical thinking is ...
  • EduPunk and the Matthew Effect
    Inside Higher Ed today has a piece on " The Rise of Edupunk ." I didn't find much new in the article, except that perhaps mai...
  • Problems with Rubric Data
    Introduction Within the world of educational assessment, rubrics play a large role in the attempt to turn student learning into numbers. ...
  • Assessment Institute 2023: Grades and Learning
    I'm scheduled to give a talk on grade statistics on Monday 10/26, reviewing the work in the lead article of JAIE's edition on grades...
  • Online Evaluations
    In the spring we took the plunge and converted our end-of-term student evaluations from paper to electronic. We used the identical form othe...
  • Pattern Matching
    A friend gave me a desk calendar with daily puzzles. Usually the numerical ones are easy, but last Friday the one above came up, and I co...