Thursday, November 18, 2010

November 19, 2010

Good Morning Instructors,

Are you looking for a new way to show your students a course trend? Or maybe there is a discussion board topic where a select group of words is highly repeated by many students, which could offer strong insight into the importance of these words or the course concepts being explored? Would a visual image help to convey the significance of certain words or concepts? If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, you may be interested in checking out what Wordle could do for you.

What is Wordle you ask? Well, according to Wordle's website (http://www.wordle.net/) "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." Understanding what Wordle truly is makes more sense when you actually see it though - after all it is a visual representation - so I encourage you to click here to check it out!

Diane Maki, one of our MBA instructors, created a Wordle in one of her discussion boards this quarter and shared the image with her students, which spurred even more critical thinking, discussion, and insights. She shared with me that students responded very positively to her use of Wordle, and I could see it really helping to drive home the point of the importance of certain words and concepts for students. Click here to check it out for yourself and see some samples in the gallery.

If you have any questions or you give this a try and have some feedback, please let me know.

Due to the Thanksgiving holiday, I won't be posting to my blog next week. My next post will be on Friday, December 3rd. And just as Diane shared this tool with me to share with the rest of you (THANKS DIANE!) please be sure to let me know of any great resources you may be using in your courses that could benefit others as well.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday! In addition to celebrating Thanksgiving, my family will also be celebrating my son's birthday as he turns 2 on Thanksgiving - so we'll be having pie AND cake at my house! Once again, have a great Thanksgiving!

Thanks!
Heather Thomton-Stockman
Online Instructional Specialist

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