Educational Value of Wordle

Wordle is an interesting, useful, creative, and visually appealing technological tool with a plethora of different potential applications within the classroom.  As a History and English teacher, I think that now, more than ever, my students' writing is under a microscope. With high-stakes testing more and more at the forefront of both my and my students' brains, I am constantly looking for ways to take the pressure off at times when we are doing writing assignments.  It is my belief that continuing to download onto the students how serious and scary these tests are will only lead them to perform worse thanks to testing anxiety, so the idea of seeing their open responses all pulled together into a Wordle is pretty neat.  That way, we can ask each other questions like "what's the main idea of your paragraph, at least according to Wordle?" If the answer is "the word THE," well then, maybe it's time to go back and edit.  Also by pulling apart the words, it makes it easier to check for spelling since you are not reading through a paragraph where words are in context. Those are just a couple of the editing applications I can see using.  I also think that it would be neat to compare a class's paragraphs on the exact same topic using Wordle, to see how truly alike they are. It would be my guess that, instead, students would be able to find patterns, but realize that they all think in different ways.

In my History classroom, Wordle is a potential tool in many ways. For example, in previewing the content of a test, to put the whole thing into this format might be an interesting way to help students see where my focus is and where they should study without feeling like I am spoon-feeding them much of the questions/answers.  It would also be an excellent tool to use before the start of a new unit, when we are going over the types of things we are going to be studying.  This use of Wordle as a previewing tool could then be a common strand throughout the unit, used a formative assessment along the way (how much of this Wordle can you identify now?) and at the end (at this point everything on here should look familiar).  I think that this scratches the surface of what the applications for this tool are and hope you will share your ideas with me as well!