Ways to use wordle.net and wordsift.com

One of my readers asked that I share some of the ways that this week's training group in Pennsylvania brainstormed using Wordle.net and wordsift.com.  Here are some of the ideas:

If you cut and paste text in the box or add your own words to the box to have the web site create the word cloud, use with students to:

• Have them make predictions about what they'll be reading/studying.
• Review the words that will be in the text.
• Explicitly teach the words that are rarest (wordsift shows you which ones).
• Have them vertify by reading whether the words are truly key words and have them prioritize them in order of importance to the topic/meaning.
• Insert a few words that don't belong in the word cloud and ask that they defend all words that belong and indentify thewords that don't belong.
• As assessment, let them use your word cloud to write a summary of what was read.

If students are creating the word clouds:

• Have them read and decide which are the key words and design their own word clouds.
• Have them crreate a word cloud for every chapter of a text, based on importance of the words.
• Have them create a wordle that describes the character, setting, conflict, etc. of a piece of fiction.  They can present it to the class and let their peers guess which character they are describing.
• Have them create a word cloud that explains their thinking as they solve a math problem/equation.
• Have them create a word cloud that represents the era of history that they're studying.
• With wordsift.com, let them create words and pictures that best represent what they are reading/studying.  (Using the workspace option, you can drag words and pictures into a new cloud.)
• As assessment, ask students to create word clouds that show the key words of what was learned.
• Let coop groups create word clouds as they read.  Then these word clouds can be traded wtih other coop groups to compare and contrast the words that were selected.  Why were some words selected and others not?

Hope this helps!  If you have additional ideas for the use of these 2 web sites, please share them with us!