Wordle

               While doing some research on different technologies I can use in my future French classes, I came across a program that I have never heard of called "Wordle." Wordle is a free technological tool where it will take a text, and then form a "word cloud" of the most common words and arranges them in the cloud by size and frequency. With this cloud, students can do a number of things! The first idea that the article talked about is a word association activity. A teacher can give the students a Wordle word cloud and ask them to brainstorm about what the text could possibly be about by looking at these most common seen words in the text. This will force the students to really think about these words they are seeing in the cloud and put them to use. Another activity students can do with Wordle is to give your students Wordle cloud in the target language, and also a Wordle cloud made by the teacher in English. The students can then do a vocabulary matching activity and work on matching the target language word with its English translation. This is a great exercise to work on the students' vocabulary. Other activities with the Wordle cloud generator are things such as word grouping where you can have the students group the words by noun gender, or by different groups such as nouns, verbs, etc. I think Wordle seems like a great simple technology that can be a springboard for so many activities! With a simple Wordle cloud, a teacher can have the students in their class do numerous activities either in a group or by themselves! I definitely want to try this technique in my future classes just as a way for my students to reinforce their vocabulary in a different way than usual.