A really useful Wordle trick

November 23rd, 2009 · 29 Comments

While I was at TESOL-France in Paris a couple of weeks ago, I met Sylvie Dolakova, a teacher, teacher trainer and writer from the Czech Republic. She was giving a talk and also presenting a poster titled Storytelling? Young Learners? Limited Vocabulary? Why Not?

Like many of us, Sylvie is a big fan of Wordle.net, an online application for making word clouds. She showed me a really useful little tip that opens up all sorts of new possibilities - a way of including phrases in word clouds. Look below and you will see what I am talking about. The phrase that Sylvie demonstrates is “Once upon a time”.

If you look at the above word cloud, you can see that there are three other phrases/collocations included in Sylvie’s word cloud: “Lesson plans”, “Body language”, and “Young learners”.

Sylvie showed me that the answer lies with the tilde sign (~). Whenever you are pasting text into the “Paste in a bunch of text” window, insert that character between any words that you want to keep together:

This really does increase the possibilities for Wordle. Here is a Phrase Cloud that I made which could be used in conjunction with this lesson plan.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

One last thing about Wordle - the site allows you to make print off the Word Clouds and Word Phrases that you make. But if you want to create jpeg images and store them on your computer, you will have to use the Screen Capture. I made a clip a while back that demonstrates how to do this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQmXQINNKeo

Tags: Wordle

29 responses so far ↓

1 glennie // Nov 23, 2009 at 10:28 pm

That tip is unbelievably useful.
Keeping to one word was very limiting.
Many thanks.
2 Callie // Nov 23, 2009 at 10:42 pm

Thanks, Jamie! Another great tip and another cool Jamie/ Dad combo
3 admin // Nov 23, 2009 at 11:49 pm

Thanks Glennie and Callie.
I thought perhaps everyone knew about this trick except me. That’s the way it goes I s’pose!
Jamie =)
4 Anita Kwiatkowska // Nov 24, 2009 at 5:06 am

Wow.
Very useful!
Thanks for sharing
Anita
5 Shelly Terrell // Nov 24, 2009 at 10:35 am

My favorite part of this was your video! Your video tutorials are excellent! Say thanks to your dad & sister who were great co-stars. Did you draw the Google taking a picture of itself? I loved it!
6 John // Nov 24, 2009 at 6:26 pm

In your wordle image above, do a strip tease? What’s that all about. And, why are all the phrases the same size? Part of the point of a word cloud is to see larger words based on frequency of use.

To use the tip with the tilda, you will have to find and replace the spaces with a tilda from all the multiple word phrases within a block of text. Or manually edit them all. Other word cloud creation tools handle phrases better (Many Eyes and Text2MindMap come to mind).
7 John L // Nov 24, 2009 at 6:51 pm

I find an easy way to capture my Wordle clouds is to print them into a PDF. This saves me steps and they can easily be inserted into other apps other than the web.
8 admin // Nov 24, 2009 at 6:52 pm

Thanks John

I don’t get your point: “Part of the point of a word cloud is to see larger words based on frequency of use.”

Says who?

The image that I have made above does nothing more to demonstrate another way of presenting phrases to learners. Personally, I think that this is more visually-stimulating than a more standard bullet-points on whiteboard format.

Wordle is a tool and is it up to the teacher to decide how he or she uses it.

Thanks for the tilda tips

Jamie
9 Neil Howie // Nov 24, 2009 at 10:26 pm

Great tip - thanks - will pass on to my staff and use in my classes.

Well done.
10 Neal Chambers // Nov 25, 2009 at 1:54 am

I love the tutorial with your dad. It’s really original and creative. Thanks for sharing this tip with Wordle. It’s such a powerful tool.

For screencapture, I usually cheat with Jing (let’s you select the area to capture). It’s free and you can draw on the images.
11 admin // Nov 25, 2009 at 9:54 am

Thanks everyone - sorry got behind with my blog comments.

Neal - I had no idea about Jing, I’d heard of it before but associated it with Ning! Thanks for that. Actually, I have a Mac now and the screen capture function (shift+ cmd + 4) also lets you select the area of the screen you want to capture.

Thanks again everyone
J =)
12 David // Nov 25, 2009 at 10:35 am

Jamie,

Thanks for the nice screencast, I’m definitely going to add it and share on our own Wordle page. I’ve been using wordle and producing “What the Wordle’s” for awhile now on EFL Classroom 2.0. Using ~ and many more wordle tricks.

Here’s an example http://picasaweb.google.com/ddeubel/Wordlegrammar#slideshow
Easy example and teachers could easily create their own or use the others I’ve already made.

Cheers,
David
13 admin // Nov 25, 2009 at 11:13 am

Thanks David

I like your slideshow. I made a similar one a while back using sentences about the Blue Whale:

http://www.jamiekeddie.com/317

Something that has just occurred to me : As we know, the more frequent a word in the source text, the bigger it will appear in the cloud.

This is how word clouds work but for the type of Wordle image we are looking at here (your muddled questions and my muddled blue whale sentences) this is not desirable. In other words, I would prefer to have each word appear in the image as many times as it appears in the sentence.

So for the jumbled sentence that I created about the blue whale’s tongue ….

Its
tongue
weighs
as
much
as
an
elephant

…. the word “as” will only appear once (but twice the size of the other words).

To get around this, we could enter the text into the Wordle box in the following way:

Its
tongue
weighs
much
as
an
elephant~as

Don’t know if that makes sense but thanks again.
Jamie
14 Jesus Lopez // Nov 25, 2009 at 12:06 pm

Greetings from Puerto Rico. Muchas gracias! Now I can start showing students useful collocations.
15 Candyce // Nov 25, 2009 at 6:01 pm

What great information everyone, I’m a wordle newbie…thanks again.

Candyce
16 alaJoAnn // Nov 26, 2009 at 2:35 am

A wonderful tip I can’t wait to try!

Another tip: You can manipulate certain words (or, now, phrases) in your Wordle to appear larger by repeating them when you “paste in a bunch of stuff”. Perhaps obvious, but I pass it along as I didn’t think of doing that at first.
17 Destiny Islands // Nov 26, 2009 at 5:38 am

This is actually insanely useful, just wanted to post that and say thanks a ton for sharing
18 Shannon // Nov 26, 2009 at 3:56 pm

Another way to save a Wordle (at least on a Mac) is to go to PRINT. On the bottom of the box, click on the PDF box and it will give you a drop down box with options. There are several options, but the one that I like to use is SAVE in iPhoto. That then lets you crop your Wordle and use it as an Image from iPhoto.

LOVE LOVE LOVE Wordle….The possibilities are endless!

Happy Thanksgiving! Shannon
19 Vladimira // Nov 27, 2009 at 1:01 pm

Hi Jamie,
first of all thanks very much for all those techy information as I am a fresher yet very much into it in terms of using it in my classroom. I wanted to ask if it is somehow possible to save a pic from wordle to my computer. Tahnks for any tips.
20 Joyce // Nov 28, 2009 at 6:59 am

Thanks so much for the wordle tip, I will use it in the classroom.
21 Patricia // Nov 29, 2009 at 12:01 am

Oh that is so cool! How’d you get so smart???
22 admin // Nov 30, 2009 at 10:49 am

Again - thank you all for the comments and additional tips. Very much appreciated!

Vladimira - have a look at the YouTube clip at the end of the post “Screen Capture: How to cheat at sports photography. I think that will explain all. Let me know.

Jamie =)
23 Maribel Boender // Nov 30, 2009 at 12:17 pm

Hi Jamie!

Thanks so much for the useful tips! and here’s a new one for you and everyone! In your response to David, you asked how we could make the word appear in the image as many times as it appears in the sentence and.. I have the answer!! I thought that if one ~ helps to form a phrase perhaps two ~~ helps to separate words and.. it worked! So you would type: He is not~~as~~tall as me and you’ll get two ‘as’. Now, my question is… does anyone have an idea how to add question marks and other symbols? unfortunately, three ~~~ didn’t work for that purpose : )

Best wishes,
Maribel
24 admin // Nov 30, 2009 at 12:24 pm

Excellent Maribel
Thank you. I can feel a second posting coming on to explain this.
Will mention you
Jamie
25 Justin K. Reeve // Nov 30, 2009 at 5:55 pm

Thanks for sharing this! What a useful tip for Wordle!
26 Peggy // Dec 18, 2009 at 9:40 pm

Great~tip! Here’s one for Mac users. You can turn your Wordle into a pdf without using screen capture. Just hit print, then click on save as pdf., located on the bottom left corner of the print dialog.
27 Chris Thomas // Feb 1, 2010 at 6:14 pm

A great tip that helps make Wordle so much more useful. I have a video tutorial on Wordle on my website which some may find useful. You can find it here:

http://www.iprimary.co.uk/tutorial.php?tutorialID=002

Chris
28 admin // Feb 1, 2010 at 7:34 pm

Thanks Chris
Good video. Will certainly send any Wordle newbies your way.
Jamie =)
29 laurie // Feb 2, 2010 at 5:55 pm

I love Wordle! So glad I accidentally stumbled on this tip!