I’ve often challenged students to think about conceptual learning and big ideas.  I’ve never been one for learning isolated facts, because those “facts” are usually lost after a summative assessment.  If students focus on concepts, they are more likely to retain their knowledge and be able to connect these ideas to new knowledge better.  Conceptual learning certainly would resonate with anyone who would subscribe to a constructivist philosophy of education.

Recently I read a blog post by Wesley Fryer touting a new Web 2.0 tool, Wordle:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. 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.

Here’s a Wordle for this blog:

I was pleased to see how often the words “students” and “learning” appear in my writing. Close behind were “technology,” “instruction,” and “data.” This represents what I would think my major thoughts and musings are.

I thought about how powerful this tool might be for allowing students to examine their own writing. Willing to evaluate myself, I processed my Review of Literature from my dissertation. No surprises here either:

Now finding this VERY interesting, I thought I’d do a comparison of my Results Section:

I really have a sense of what my study was about when I examine the Conclusions:

Wordle is not content audited, so teachers who might choose to use this tool should be sensitive to appropriate Internet safety for their students. However, the power to allow students to creatively interpret their written work, and then examine content trends seems very powerful to me.