Activity # 1: Wordle

Activity 1: "Our world is in danger" 

-Level: Intermediate.

-Skills: Reading and writing.

The teacher introduces the name of the activity: "Our world is in danger" and asks sts to provide examples of what people do to damage our environment. Then she/ he elicits phrases such as: global warming, air pllution, acid rain, etc.

After that, the teacher divides the class into groups of  3 people and gives each group a topic, for example: greenhouse effect, global warming, endangered species, etc. ( None of the groups should know what the rest of the class is working on. )

Each group is supposed to hand in a writing ( as a summary for each topic ) which will be evaluated by the teacher. Next, each writing will be used to create a word cloud.

The word clouds will be printed out and distributed among the different groups. Each group will have to prepare a writing trying to guess what the original text was about.

After correcting the second writings, the teacher will hand out the original texts for the sts to see if their guesses were right.

- Evaluation:

The teacher should correct the writings paying attention to the use of vocabulary related to the topic and the use of correct tenses (specifically present simple). She/ he should correct all the mistakes in the first writing so as to avoid mistakes inside the word cloud.

-Description:

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.

- How to use it:

1- Go to the following website: www.wordle.com and click on "CREATE":

2- A- Paste in a bunch of text or,

    B- Enter the URL of any blog, blog feed or any otherweb page that has an Atom or Rss feed     or,

    C- Enter a del.icio.us user name to see the tags.

And click on "GO":

3- The tools creates the word cloud an gives you options to edit it, change the language, the font, the layout and the color:

4-Once you concider your loud is perfect, click on the option "Print" or the option "Save it to public gallery". If you click on "Save to public gallery", you have to give your cloud a title and create your user`s name:

5- Finally the tool gives you the chance to copy and paste an embed code if you want to share it:

- This tool is useful because it makes it easy to create the clouds and you can relate it to any topic. By using word clouds you can work on improving students` writing and reading skills.