Tag: wordle
Teaser Three – Watching the Progress Bar turn Blue
Lately I have been using Camtasia to create Screen Casts for my eWindows site. Now usually I am a strictly freeware kind of girl (well that’s a little bit of a fib because I have paid for Edublogs, Voicethread, Flickr and my domain names, anyway …) but I am really impressed with Camtasia. So much so that I may even fork-out for it after my free one month trial (this is awesome, try before you buy!).
Camtasia is easy to use, has great support and tutorials. It runs seamlessly with my Mac and uploads directly to YouTube. At one easy payment of $99.00 (Education Pricing) I do believe it may be a keeper, though it may have to wait until after I recover from my little trip to Christchurch (only 9 more sleeps!). O, and after we wallpaper the living room. Below is my weekly-ish offering to the Blog-o-sphere. My third ever Screen Cast on how to add a Wordle.net Word-cloud to a post. So readers, I would really like some feedback here, how did I do? It’s a lot harder than it looks.
wordle – Beautiful Words
Wordle.net is an very new (less than four months old) and interesting site, that creates these colourful ‘Word Clouds’ from text pasted into the site. 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.
At first glance, not unlike the creator Jonathan Feinberg, I thought wordle.net was merely an entertaining way to display what ever you had on your mind. However, upon closer investigation, the potential for enhancing learning quickly became apparent. According to his FAQ section, Jonathan has received other 100 requests from teachers since Wordles conception.
Let’s have a look at an example of powerful words:
Some enterprising person has inserted Eleanor Roosevelt’s speech on human rights into Wordle.net. You can clearly see the 150 most used words (small connective words are automatically removed). As you can see in Eleanor’s speech, the themes of Freedom, Human Rights and People have a strong presence. Lets compare Eleanor’s speech, with George Bush’s speech on Sept 11, 2001.
Hmmmmm . . . Anyway, give a Wordle a go, it is a great way to analyse documents quickly and painlessly. Just look at this next Wordle, it could save us all some time.