Teaching tool- Wordle - word clouds

I have been experimenting with a blended learning (Zhao et al. 2005; US Department of Education, 2010) approach within my classes recently - One of the tools that I have utilised has been wordle - The website describes the tool as a toy for generating “word clouds” from text (Wordle, 2012). The website reports that the clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text (Wordle, 2012). I utilised this tool by setting a task to my entire operational management class of 100. I set a forum debate up using moodle and set the question for each student to write a facebook style post of how they live their lives (ensuring that they only post information they would like to share with the group).


Our aim as a class was to understand students as a client group. 85 students wrote a post about the key issues affecting their lives (where they like to eat, go out, what they watch on tv how they use the university etc...) the average post was 100 words. I inserted the information from every post into the wordle tool and generated a word cloud of their answers. This task was completed over night and we started the session the next day with the World cloud on a power point slide. There was a positive reaction to the tool and it initiated a good discussion and debate within the group it also provided a stimulus for further research. A very to easy tool to use and creates an impact in class - there are no ownership issues and wordle allow you to reproduce the cloud in any way you wish - I will be using it again .....


References

U.S. Department of Education (2010) Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies. Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development Policy and Program Studies Service

Wordle (2012) http://www.wordle.net/ accessed February 2012

Zhao, Y., J. Lei, B. Yan, C. Lai, and H. S. Tan. (2005). What makes the difference? A practical

analysis of research on the effectiveness of distance education. Teachers College Record 107

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