Experimenting with Word Clouds
// March 10th, 2009 // No Comments » // Classroom Activities, Education
Wordle is a very useful tool that allows you to create word clouds from text. It’s very simple to use: you just copy text in any language, paste it into Wordle and it will sift through it and create clouds with the most commonly occurring words in the text. You can then edit the shape, the colours and the font in the cloud and even remove words you don’t like by right-clicking on them.
I am going to try it today with my Year 12 Studies of Religion class.
This is what I am going to do.
1) I have found the following article from the daily telegraph that is about the hajj (which is one of the areas we have studied this term).
HUNDREDS of thousands of Muslim pilgrims have massed in a valley near the Saudi holy city of Mina for the stoning of Satan, the last and most dangerous rite of the annual hajj.
Hundreds of people have been trampled to death in stampedes which have blighted several previous pilgrimages to Islam’s holiest sites when the faithful rush to hurl stones at pillars symbolising the devil.
So far this year no major incidents have been reported, although a record number of pilgrims from abroad travelled to the holy sites, with a total of more than two million worshippers.
A large security force was monitoring the pilgrims as they gathered for the stoning after slaughtering sheep in a ritual for the Feast of the Sacrifice (Eid al-Adha) to recall Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son on God’s order.
The authorities have built bridges at three different levels on the stoning site in a bid to avoid the trampling that caused the deaths of 364 people in 2006, 251 in 2004 and 1426 in 1990.
The interior ministry has assembled 100,000 stewards to ensure safety during the hajj, one of the five pillars of Islam which the Koran says Muslims must carry out at least once in their lives if they are well enough and can afford it.
The ministry said on Saturday that almost 1.73 million pilgrims had entered the kingdom from abroad, the highest number ever, joining hundreds of thousands of Saudi citizens and other residents participating this year.
2) I copied and pasted the article into www.wordle.net
3) changed the colour and played around with the shape
4) used snag it (http://www.techsmith.com/screen-capture.asp) to capture the image
5) I will put the image up on the screen and ask students to look at the word cloud and try to ascertain the gist of the original article. Hopefully this will lead to group discussion and their vocabulary will be increased as they look at each individual word.
6) Once they have come up with the gist of the article I will hand out copies of the original articles in full to my students for us to discuss further.
I will let you know how it goes!!
