Wordle – Quick & Easy Word Clouds

“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.”

You can type text into the site, paste it in, or even enter the URL of a site you wish to turn into a word cloud.  I pasted the text from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” into the site.  I left the default option in place to omit common words, and limited the number of words in the cloud to 50.  Wordle allows up to 150 words.  I borrowed this idea from a social studies teacher who presents word clouds like this to his students and asks them to figure out who wrote the speech.  I’ve also known teachers to use these as a means of analyzing text.