Who says assignments are boring?

Through Twitter I found this beautiful little tool called Wordle. I don’t know whether it is useful but it’s definitely fun and looks good. After a long day typing text and being serious it might be just the right tool to relax a bit and be creative.

Had to right that boring letter or have been working on that assingment for days? Why not copy it to Wordle and make a piece of art of it? It makes a beautiful cover for the assignment. I can also imagine other uses, like writing some key words about a person and making a postcard of it to send to that person as a greeting. The teacher could also make a postcard out of the students’ essays or blog posts and send it back together with the grading to say “thank you” for their efforts. Of course, students can also make their own after finishing an assignment. These can be exhibited in the classroom or on the class blog and the class can vote for the most beautiful one.

Here is a Wordle piece of art of this post :

Follow this link to see my assignments turned into colourful word clouds.

Updated on 25 July 2008:

José Picardo had an interesting idea on how to use Wordle in a lesson. He created Wordle clouds of two online news articles on the same topic. Students in pairs described to their partners what their article was about by looking at the tag cloud. Dictionary work was also planned in. A very creative and engaging pre-reading task in my opinion.

In one of the comments on José’s blog I found another interesting classroom activity with Wordle. A class of 5-7 year olds went on an excursion to an art gallery. Then they brainstormed and voted for the words that best described the event and created a Wordle picture with those.