It's Wordle time!

Hi beautiful readers!

Have you ever come across with the word "wordle"? If you haven't heard of it before, it's okay because today I will tell you a great way to teach reading lesson or any other lesson, aim to teach vocabulary by using Wordle, the 'word clouds' website.

Clouds, colours, visuals, funky fonts and highlighted vocabulary items are one of the best features that is provided by this website. Wordle is basically a 'word art' tool that can transform any texts into a beautiful word clouds. The resulting image will highlight the most common words by maximizing their size based on how many times it appears in the text. In other word, the most frequent words appear in the text will be highlighted bigger. All you need is, to copy and paste any texts you desired or just key in the URL and your text cloud is ready to be printed.

Below are the snapshots and the descriptions of the website: http://www.wordle.net/

Picture 1: CREATE YOUR OWN WORDLE CLOUDS

Picture 2: Copy and Paste any texts you wished. Click OK. Here, I took a poem by Emily Dickinson as an example.

Picture 3: Tadaaaaa~ Your text cloud is here! You can edit it, change the fonts, the layouts and the colours too.

Picture 4: LIKE THIS!

The Question is : Is it useful for language learning?

I believe that Wordle is very useful for teaching and learning in the classroom. The aim for teaching can be varied according to lessons but it serves the same purposes, getting students to understand the lessons better. By combining colours, words and clouds, it is good for student's brain as the text clouds are usually vibrant and colourful. It makes a good vocabulary lesson as for me the list of words (organised in such way) are easily captured in students' mind.

Depending on students level of proficiency, the activities could vary. Some of the activities that can be considered are:

• Pre-reading activity. Teachers use text clouds to ask students to guess the story that they are going to read. This methods is good for previewing text to activate prior knowledge and to build expectation from texts.
• Poster. Ask students to pick any poems they like and transform it into Wordle.
• Summary. Good to give an overview of essays.

Why choose Wordle?

• Free!
• Colourful.
• Can be printed.
• Creative way to present ideas.

BUT.................

• Sometimes if the words are too many, the tendency for the words to jumble up in different sizes is greater.

But hey, it's very easy to fall in love with this website. It has a WOW factor. Try yourself!

Till then, bye-bye!