Week 12 - Cool Tool: Wordle

This week I examined the cool tool Wordle. Wordle is a tool that generates a “word cloud” from text you provide. These words should be taken from the text or assigned reading for the class or content area. This will allow you to provide the students additional exposure to the words that are important for the material that you’re cover and that might show up on a test or assessment. Wordle allows you to edit your cloud with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes to make it your own.

When attempting to create my own Wordel I used words from this class:

• Twitter

• Trends in Education

• Open Education

• Copyright

• Digital Citizenship

• Learning Spaces

• Productivity Tools

• TPACK

• Blended Learning

• Assessments

• Maker Studio

Cool Tools

However I could not get Wordle to work on several machines and web browsers I tried. The problem seemed to arise from some prohibitor that comes in the default setting in your computers firewall. Do to this I would NOT recommend this tool to other educators. I like the idea and concept and think it could be very beneficial for students. However I’m not sure how many people possess the technical knowledge to go into their computers firewalls to change whatever setting is needed to allow this to be compatible with your machine. Furthermore if you do change the firewall protections are you opening yourself and your computer up to unwanted hacks due to the changed protective settings?

This tool would be good for students to use as they read through text to keep track of what words they found to be important whale reading. However the same issue applies that could cause students issues is the settings in the firewall.

Like I said before I like the concept and idea of Wordle a lot however the issue with the firewall is concerning. I will have to look into other tools to see if there is another tool out there that will allow you to do similar things.