Green Eggs & Ham

Dr. Suess was once challenged by his editor to create a book using 50 words or less, the culmination of which we know and love as the classic "Green Eggs and Ham."  As educators we are often challenged to come up with a method to capture and keep our students attention focused, and, like Dr. Suess, we strive to do it as efficiently and effectively as possible while cutting through all the outlying chaff which gets in our way.  A tool I was introduced to at the NCCE 2009 conference a few weeks ago gives us a quick, easy, fun, and FREE way of doing this.

Worldle.net is a web application which can take a chunk of text from various inputs and push back out a graphical image representing the frequency of the word in the text. In honor of the recent birthday of Theodor Geisel I have input the text of "Green Eggs and Ham" into the application and in less than 5 minutes arrived at this:

If you're like me you look at this and think, "Gee, that's neat, but how is it relevant?"

Imagine that you've just finished a book, chapter, section, etc.  Now ask your students to type and email you the top 10 concepts from the material. When all the responses are collected copy 'em to the appropriate box in the application, hit the "Go" button, and then spend as much (or as little) time as you want to create your image.  As I stated previously, the above representation was created in less than 5 minutes.  Another application springing to mind would be to take census data (surnames, place of birth, occupation, etc.) from a certain place, time, etc. and feed it in to acquire the most popular surnames and then to see what information presents itself.  Below is another example utilizing a list of 100 best novels.

Please feel free to leave comments or links to your own Wordles below or share ways in which you can use them.

Thanks
Scott