I like to use Wordle as an opportunity to learn about and encapsulate key content or concepts. Often when I read and summarise articles I pull out the key words and concepts, and Wordle allows me to do this in a more visual, engaging and concrete manner.
This is a Wordle I created for an education kit for VADEA NSW about the Australian artist Jonathan Jones. By collecting and bringing together all the relevant words associated with the artist and his practice from newspaper articles and other sources, I am able to gain a basic overview of what this artist knows and does.
I am hoping to use Wordle in this manner as a starting point for student investigations, where students start their thesis/investigations with a basic lower-order, but also very important, 'name and define'. I've not talked about Max Wood's ALARM Matrix for teaching and learning in this blog yet but I intend to... it is something I have been working on during the last term, and it is a very effective matrix for student response, guiding them from a basic name and define right through to critical evaluation.
