Wordle or Wordsift

A Web 2.0 word cloud or text visualization tool similar to Wordle is Wordsift. What distinguishes Wordsift is its more academic purpose. It allows users to highlight words based on their association with a content area: ESL, Language Arts, Social Studies, Science, Math. It seeks to help English Language Learners by including a Visual Thesaurus Window and a Google Images Window. Each of these windows changes when a user selects a different word from the word cloud. Wordsift also includes the option to view the parts of the original text or the whole text with the selected word highlighted. This is very helpful for seeing how a word is used throughout a text.

Anyway, I wanted to compare Wordle and Wordsift with a couple of text types. My first choice was the young adult novel The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer (first 3 chapters taken from Destiny Title Peek). With this piece I found Worlde more useful in that it clearly showed the first three chapters to be about character development.

My second choice was the OpEd piece "Does Gay Sex Cause Global Warming" by Daniel Gilbert. With this piece I found both value in both Wordle and Wordsift; however the Google Image feature of Wordsift would be blocked when using it at school. Our district has found Google Image returns questionable images even when operating in Moderate Safe Mode.

Wordle--As a Tool for Previewing/Reviewing a Text

Wordle is a cool Web 2.0 application that makes a word cloud out of text. On a basic level, it is a frequency analysis where the high frequency words are presented in larger fonts. I wanted to see what a really long text would look like so I uploaded our 100+ page WASC Report. I was happy with the results as students and teachers showed up as a clear focus of our school: