www.wordle.net

According to its website, Wordle "is a toy for generating 'word clouds' from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends."

I am going to use Wordle with my Spanish 1 class. They will create a word cloud of adjectives that describe them. The class usually has difficulty with following directions, so I have typed out the directions step by step. Hopefully, they will be able to follow them. To the left is a word cloud that I made. In order to get some words bigger than others, you need to type them several times.

I will have the students print out their word clouds to display around the room (and Open House is coming up soon, so it will be a good thing to show off!). I will not have my students save it to the gallery because I do not want their first and last names out in cyberspace.