Wordle——Make your own beautiful word clouds!

What is Wordle?

Wordle is a website that can quickly calculate the word frequency of your chosen text and make it into different types of beautiful word clouds based on their relevant frequency.

How to use Wordle?

Wordle is very easy to use. Basically, here are the steps you'll need to do.

1. Go to Wordle. Click the 'Create' button.

2. Paste your chosen text and click 'Go'.

3. Wait for a few seconds and you'll get your word clouds.

4. Make certain adjustments by choosing your the font, color, layout and some language to make it look better.

5. Give it a name and save the url address and the code.

For further instruction on how to use Wordle, please watch this tutorial video.

How does Wordle foster language teaching and learning?

1. Pre-reading Tasks. Before introducing a piece of reading to students, teachers could show them the word cloud first and do the following tasks.

• Ask students to guess the general idea or the topic of the text.
• Ask students to discuss this topic so as to activate their schemata. 
• Ask students to make up some sentences with the most frequently used words. 

2. Post-reading Tasks. After students have read the text, put the text away and do some follow-up activities based on the word cloud.

• Ask students to write down the topic sentence of the text based on their memory and the word cloud.
• If students have higher level of proficiency, the teacher could ask students to reconstruct the text. 

In both pre-reading and post-reading activities, this tool can help students to construct their own language, during which process, they will have to pay attention to not only vocabulary, but also collocation and grammar in order to reconstruct the text. It encourages students to do a lot of language processing, through which language acquisition is achieved.

What are the good points?

• Easy to use, no need to register.
• Highly customized and very beautiful formats of the word clouds.
• Calculate word frequency very fast.
• Result in beautiful final product.

What are the limitations?

• You have to have Java in your computer for Wordle to work. Ipad is not available.
• Every time you change the font, the whole cloud changes. So once you see a cloud you like, save it ASAP.
• When I embed it into my blog, the picture was too vague. The one below is captured by Jing.
• It does't concern any further vocabulary exercise except the frequency.

An example

This is a piece of news from Warwick official website, reporting that University of Warwick the 'Top Target' for graduate employers.

Please click here for the news.

I set up all the colors, chose a favorable font and crossed out those most frequently used English words such as 'the' and 'is'. I also canceled some words which I think is not quite relevant to this topic. And the picture below is what I've got. You can also check it out by the specific url address which I forgot to save. So, always remember to save the url and the code.

Voki

What is Voki?

Voki is a website that enables users to express themselves on the web in their own voice using a talking character. 

For the visual part, you can customize your Voki in many aspects, for example you can choose your favorite character, the background picture, you can choose his/her clothes and even the color of the eyes.

And when it comes to voice, you can either directly record yourself speaking on Voki, or you can upload a recording, and you can also choose another voice and type your sentences so that he/she would read it for you.

After finishing your Voki, you can send a link to others' email or embed it into your own blog or your face book account.

How to use Voki?

Why language teachers should use Voki?

What are the limitations of Voki?

• The recording is limited to only one minute, which is too short for speaking practice. But if you pay and become a member, you can get more time to speak and record.
• There are so many options for customization that young learners may be easily distracted to the look of the characters rather than focus on speaking practice.
• It seems you can only embed one Voki in one post, you can't do more in one post.
• At least on my computer, the recording doesn't go well, therefore, I made a recording on Vocaroo and then upload it on Voki. Hopefully, it works well on others'.

Dvolver

What is Dvolver?

Dvolver is an online free movie maker. Teachers, as well as students, can use it to create your own cartoon movies, and send them to others' email or embed them in your blogs.

Click here to access Dvolver: http://www.dvolver.com/moviemaker/

How to use Dvolver?

Dvolver is very easy to learn for everyone and even students can learn to use it very quickly. Basically, you can just follow the instructions (the words in yellow in the upper left corner) and click "Next" (on the lower right corner) until you finish. Below is a Step-by-Step instruction, which presents an example of how to make cartoon movies using Dvolver. 

1. Select a background and a sky.

2. Select a plot.

3. Select one or two character(s).

4.Type in the characters' lines. 

5. Select music. IF the dialogue is not finished, select 'Add a new scene' and repeat the previous steps until you finish the whole dialogue. Otherwise, select 'Finish movie'.

6. Select movie title design and type in the movie title and director's name.

7. Preview and send the movie.

8. Copy the code in the white box and make sure paste it into your blog in "HTML" mode.

Done! It's just as simple as that. And this is the movie I made.

The dialogue above is cited from Longman New Concept English Book 1 by  L. G. Alexander.

Why should language teachers use Dvolver?

1. It is absolutely a more interesting way to present dialogues than textbooks.
2. Students/Teachers have many choices of the characters and the scenes. You can type in any dialogue you like. Therefore, students are better motivated, especially young learners.
3. It is easy to use, for both teachers and students.
4. Students can create their own dialogues. They are not just 'passive knowledge receivers', instead, they are encouraged to be explorers and creators of language (Brown, 1991).
5. It assists Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT), for example, role play tasks.
6. It stimulates students' imagination.
7. Once you finish a movie, it is saved online, so it doesn't take up your computer space.

How can Dvolver foster language learning?

Role play

1. When teachers first introduce the text or dialogue to students, traditionally, by playing a tape or simply reading the dialogues to the class. Now, you can play a cartoon movie.
2. Instead of teacher giving some example sentence and asking students to read after him/her, students can make up their own dialogues using the grammar patterns they have just learned from textbooks. 
3. Teachers can type in the students' dialogues, make a movie in class and ask students to do a role play by dubbing for the movie.
4. Instead of asking students to recite the text, teachers can ask students to make their own movies and send it to the teachers or embed it into students' blogs.
5. Teachers can also use Dvolver to give feedback using the 'one person speaking' plot.

What are the limitations of Dvolver?

1. There's a 100-letter limitation for each speaker in one single turn. Therefore, it can't be used for very long or many sentences.
2. There are only six turns in one scene. But you can add as many scenes as you like. Theoretically, the dialogues can be as long as you like, but they have to be breakdown in to separate scenes.
3. The characters are limited. Especially, in a Chinese EFL context where I belong to, students are not really familiar with any of these cartoon characters.
4. It only allows for one or two character(s) at most and it doesn't work for three or more speakers in one scene. 
5. You can't download the movie. You will have to access the internet in order to watch. I suggest you use a screen recording software to record your movie and save it in your computer so that you can use it where you like.