Wordle

I was led to this site by looking at teachertrainingvideos.com

The website is www.wordle.net

You type or paste in some text and the site generates a 'word-picture' of the key lexical items. Here is an example that I generated in 3 minutes. I was looking for an imaginative way to introduce the topic of 'Holidays'. I found a simple GCSE exemplar text from the internet, and copied it into the site. This was the result.

It was a great way to get the pupils to imagine what the person had been writing about (find the key words), ask questions about where he had been / stayed / what he had done etc. It was far more interesting than showing a printed text.

You have control over the font colour, text size and orientation or you can accept their design templates.

It could work equally as well as a final product in a series of work. Once the pupils have written their text, they could copy it into this site, generate their word picture and use it for display or for a prompt card for a speaking assignment.

I also used it to create a birthday card for my Mum! Typed in all the key words I could think off relating to her and printed off 4 different versions onto  A4 photopaper to be framed! Great! (or maybe I'm just a cheapskate!)