WORDLE

It's not very often that a teacher leaves a class hearing another student say to another, 'Today's class was great, you're going to love it!' This is precisely what happened today and it was after having a class using 'www.wordle.net'.  For those of you who are not familiar with Wordle, it's a great tool for making word clouds. I usually use it in the language class for vocabulary, however today I used it to show the grammar tense, '1st Conditional'.  I had previously made a wordle using sentences such as, 'If you have a headache, take an aspirin', 'If there is an earthquake, get under the table', etc... The students paired up and had find the 10 sentences that were hidden within the wordle.  They did it as a race and this seemed to inspire them more.  Once finished, they had to invent a few examples of their own and we proceeded in making our own class wordle of 1st Conditional.  We agreed on the font, colour, design, etc... and their wordle was published on the net in seconds!  They loved the fact that others would be able to see their work.  For homework, each pair had to make their own wordle using their own examples that they did in class.  All in all, it was an inspiring class and the students were enthusiastic about using this tool for their own personal purposes.
* A word of advise:  Remember to print out your wordle or copy and paste it onto another document (I use the notebook cutting tool).  Wordle doesn't have a search box and it's practically impossible to find your wordle once you've exited the program.