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At the end of June 2008, Jonathan Feinberg, a senior software engineer at IBM, launched Wordle, a website that he describes as "a toy for generating 'word clouds' from text that you provide." As an example, the Wordle used as this column's title was made by pasting in the entire article and limiting the design to the thirty most common words.
Wordle (http://wordle.net) is ingeniously simple to use. Click create. Paste or type text in the box, and click go. Tweak the design by changing layouts, fonts, and palettes of color. You can also limit the number of words to be displayed. While you can't place a word exacdy where you want it, you can try infinite random configurations. After you have selected a layout style, color scheme, and font, just keep trying the re-layout with current settings option in the layout menu. In addition to saving your creation for your own use (see Side Trip), you can also post your Wordle in the gallery.
Using Your Wordles
Wordle can be addicting. In the first 5 weeks, 100,000 Wordles were posted in the site's gallery, with unpublished Wordles totaling many times that figure. As with many other digital tools, calling it a "toy" camouflages its power. As I have played with Wordle and browsed the gallery, some powerful applications to literacy skills suggest themselves.
Reading Skills
* Predicting. Paste in a unit or chapter introduction or a prolog. Have students predict the main idea, the conflict, or the theme of the longer work. Using the option in the layout menu, you may want...