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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.

Wordle is being used in interesting ways to provide compelling summaries of political speeches, blog posts, twitter feed, news articles and more, but there are additional educational uses worth considering.

A few ideas:

1. Convert a sonnet or Shakespearean play; or children's book (Dr. Seuss anyone?);2. Paste the contents of an online discussion to coalesce the main ideas;3. Combine student 'Who Are You?' introductions, or 'SuperheroTraits' to develop a class composite;4. Condense survey data by dumping content of questionnaire responses into the Wordle engine;5. Combine news articles or RSS feeds on a given topic;6. Turn an essay into a poster;7. Combine blog posts over time into a simplified represetation or use it to compare the ideas of competing ideas;8. Use font, colour and arrangement strategies to appropriately represent content;9. Automate the creation of word poetry;10. As an introduction to a unit or course, combine key words; themes; curriculum expectations to provide learners with a visual overview of content;11. Convert nutritional content of one's weekly diet or of a group's menu preferences;12. Condense a Wikipedia article into it's essence;13. Paste the results of a Google search (Can you guess the keywords I used?);14. Convert social bookmark tags;15. Enter keywords from weekly weather reports to obtain a seasonal picture;16. Distill song lyrics like "Stairway to Heaven";17. Find out what you've been up to by summarizing To-Do lists;18. Represent the results of a brainstorming session or the minutes of a meeting visually;19. Show "Today in History" stories in a new way;20. Convert past or current email messages into a composite of your correspondence;