I’ve been playing around with Wordle, a tag cloud creator, that takes any text or web page that you give it and makes a visual representation of the words. The more often a word appears, the larger it’s size will be. I was thinking that this could be a fun way to graphically represent some of the big concepts in a class. For example, in the image below, I pasted the text from the Wikipedia entry on “sociology” into Wordle and this is what it produced. This would be a great graphic to use as a lead in to a class or a specific lesson. (click on the image to see a larger picture)
And here’s one I did using the Wikipedia entry for “biology”.
This could be a fun way to add images into an online class while at the same time helping students to visualize the big concepts of what is being covered.