Their assignment was to pick a category of the Dewey Decimal system and come up with a list of words that describe the subjects of the books you find in that category. They then typed those words into the wordle program and created their word cloud. These students didn't follow instructions and actually printed out the image, when they were only supposed to use the Print Screen key on the keyboard to save it, but we made use of their mistake and hung the image in the appropriate section of the library. In this case it was the 700s of Dewey. After everyone finished their wordles, I managed to save them all to a flash drive and create a power point so that we could play a game and guess which section of Dewey each pair of students chose to study. I thought it was a really great way to get the students in the stacks and get them familiar with the classification system.
So while, this may not be the intended use of Wordle, I think it accomplished my objective. I almost wish that I was a writing teacher so that we could plug in samples of their writing so they can see that maybe Student A uses the word "however" more than any other word, or that perhaps Student B uses the word "like" 15 times in two paragraphs.
This is the wordle I just created after typing the above text. Click to see it enlarged.
