Wordle (for looking at text)

Wordle is a great little online tool that creates beautiful tag clouds out of any text you paste in. And it copes pretty well with a LOT of text. Here’s one of the opening letters from Mary Shelley’s Franksentein, which I’ve been teaching this year, in terms of the key words. Wordle gives more prominence to words that recur a lot in the text, so it’s suddenly become a useful tool in terms of helping students analyse and uncover the big ideas in the text. I love the big ICE at the bottom!

Only trouble is that Wordle has no export function, so you’ll have to use some kind of print screen or screen capture tool (we love JING) to snip the word cloud you create.