Wordle

This week a new Web 2.0 tool was introduced to us, Wordle.  With Wordle the user is able to create a word cloud which is a group of words put together in random order and direction.  I did not really like this tool because I do not see it being very useful.  I can see myself using it maybe as a different way to display the names of students in my class, or help students see which words show up most in a speech, but I do not think Wordle has much use past this.  Not only do I not see much use for Wordle, I think that it is too difficult to share your word cloud with people.  It is nice that you do not need a Wordle account, but this also means the user cannot save their word cloud or share it easily.  The options you have if you would like to share your word cloud with others is to print it or take a screen shot.

As far as the presentation of the tool, I thought the group did a nice job especially for having to go first.  I see it will be helpful for my group to walk through the presentation on our own before presenting to make sure we do not come across any problems like this group did with Java.  Also I realize that it takes a lot longer to create a Glog on Glogster than it took to create a word cloud on Wordle.  This means we are just going to have to get the class started, and I think we should keep the whole class working on creating the same exact Glog so they can stay on task.  Also this will better ensure that we get to show them the things that we feel are important.  We can share our artifacts at the end so the class sees what a finished Glog looks like since I know they will not finish one in class.