Wordle is Web 2.0 tool that creates word clouds based on the text you provide. I've used Wordle in various ways the past few years, and I love the results. It has a very easy to use interface and students love using it. The best part is that it's free and there is no need to register to use the site, so you don't have to remember another username and password.
The the video below walks you through creating a Wordle using the latest blog post from Rena Hanaway's Creating Ripples blog as the source text.
The cut and paste function of Wordle can allow the user to create some interesting word clouds. The biggest way I've used this in class is in creating thematic posters to go along with George Orwell's Animal Farm. Because the novel is now in the open domain, the text is available fully on various websites. Using these sites, I take each chapter and past them into the Wordle applet one at a time. Bumping the word count up to 999 so that the clouds are full of words, the resulting clouds give a great visual overview of the main events and prominent characters as the novel progresses. My students enjoy predicting the events that will occur in the chapters based on the names that show so prominently in the cloud. Below is an example of the cloud from chapter one of the book.
When I first started using Wordle, I noticed it looked at each word individually, so you couldn't use phrases. There is, however, a way to do this. If you have words that you want to be analyzed as a phrase, you join them with a tilda (~). This symbol is located beside the (1/!) key directly above the TAB key. I used this feature to create the cloud below, which has my name, the courses I teach, the name our student newspaper, various literary and grammar terms, and the names of several authors. To achieve this, I put my name in the text box as Mr.~Drummond, and then copied and pasted it 9 times so it would be the largest. For the author's names, they all had a tilda (~) between them, like Mark~Twain, Jasper~Fforde, Emily~Dickinson, etc.
