Wordle Meme- Documenting your Zeitgeist
There is a Wordle Meme floating around the bloggersphere, started by GeekyMomma. Here are the instructions:
1. Create a Wordle from your blog’s RSS feed.
2. Blog it and describe your reaction. Any surprises?
3. Tag others to do the same.
4. Be sure to link back here and to where you were first tagged.
I would like to take the meme several steps further.
Since the RSS feed of your blog will be only a snapshot in time of what your are posting to your blog,
5. Create different Wordle clouds of your blog’s RSS over a period of time. Do it once a month for the next year.
Save your Wordle screenshots in a special folder on your computer or even better create a set on Flickr to store your archived clouds. See what story your Wordle clouds tell as you compare them to each other. Start documenting your “Zeitgeist” (Spirit of the Times) as mentioned by Chris Betcher in his K-12 Online Conference presentation I like Delicious Things. An Intoduction to Tagging and Folksonomies
6. Share other uses (at least one)Â you have found for Wordle (for your students or personally) to your blog post
Look at Web2.0 Wednesday Challenge‘s examples
Here is Langwitches’ RSS blog feed November 26, 2008
Reaction:
What are some of the tags that stick out the most:
tags, tools, children, ICT, storytelling, classroom, Animoto, great, Art, Journey, Alphabet.
The word “tags” must be so big, because I post daily my del.cio.us links to my blog. The last few days were mostly these automated del.cio.us posts and few authored posts. So, I feel that that it is not an accurate “snapshot” of what Langwitches is mainly about. It is a snapshot if this past week only.
The following is my del.cio.us cloud taken as of November 26th, 2008. I will also start storing this snapshot with a timestamp on Flickr, in order to be able to compare in the future to others.
Here is my “other” suggestions how you could use Wordle with your students. Our elementary school teachers may times(in different grade levels) have their students create a self portrait and ask their classmates to write an adjective or describe that person in a sentence around the illustration. How about if you start a text document and ask each student to start writing their name about ten times. Then have other students add to that document words that they think of when describing him or her. You can then paste it into Wordle and voila have a word cloud about the student. Make sure you make it clear that it is OK to write the same word more than one time.
I created the following word cloud by copy and pasting several recommendation letters that were written about me into Wordle.
I am tagging the follwing people to join in by contributing Wordle uses in the classroom and getting into the habit of “wordleing” to documenting their “Zeitgeist”:
- Paige McGee
- Katie Bennett
- Kathy Balek
- Melanie Holtsman
- Andrea Hernandez
- Chrissy Hellyer
- Kim Cofino
- Heather Vlach
- Nancy van Wahlde
- Anyone else who wants to jump on board
Hola Silvia,
Heidi
qué gracioso, qué casualidad, hoy con el taller de los de 2do. y 3ro., estuvimos haciendo WORDLES. Escribimos las palabras que explican qué hicimos, qué programas usamos y sobre todo los nombres de los chicos con los que trabajaron generalamente.
IncreÃble los resultados, “die Geschichte von dem was wir dieses Jahr gemacht haben” dijeron!
Para seguir usando este programa, incluso con los más chicos.
This was a great exercise – a fun way to look at my blogging in a new way. And hopefully a way to encourage some of my colleagues to try this out. Here’s my blog post:
http://nlcommunities.com/communities/magistra_m/archive/2008/11/28/201214.aspx
@Heidi
Wordle es tan simple, pero tiene tantas aplicaciones. Lo que me fascina a mi, es que la mayoria de las personas no entienden que uso puede tener hasta que lo vean personalmente. Casi se puede comparar con poesia que uno tampoco entiende hasta uno se toma el tiempo de analizar y “sentirlo”.
Todavia no vimos todas las cosas que docententes son capaces de ensenar con Wordle. Augen auf, da kommen bestimmt noch ganz tolle Sachen!
@Magistra
Thank you for taking the time. I am very interested in how you will use Worlde in your Latin classroom. Please share your ideas.
I have a question. Is creating the wordle from my blog’s RSS feed the same as putting in the URL for my blog? I tried putting in what I thought was the feed (starts with feed:) but it said not a valid URL. When I put in the URL, I only get words from the last 5 or so posts in my wordle.
@Andrea
The feed pulls only the last few posts of your blog. The same happens to mine too. Have not found a solution to that. Anyone has advice on that?
Here you go friend:
http://onceuponateacher.blogspot.com/2008/12/wordle-meme-documenting-your-zeitgeist.html
Thanks for always making me think
[...] So, here’s my effort at the Wordle Meme, started by GeekyMomma, and brought to my attention by Silvia Tolisano. [...]
As usual, I’m late to the party, but here it is: http://mscofino.edublogs.org/2008/12/10/a-wordle-a-day/ Loved your two add-ons, made me think about ways I could use Wordle tomorrow!