Wordle & iGoogle

At the beginning, I did not think that Wordle would be that useful in the classroom.  The technology itself is interesting and it does create eye-catching word maps, but I had a hard time thinking of how I could use it in my French classroom.  As I began to think through it more and did a little research, however, I thought of several ideas.  I think it could be a very useful tool to use to help students learn and study vocabulary.  Learning vocabulary can be very boring and arduous, and something like Wordle could make the process more interactive and engaging.  Teachers can use word clouds that include French vocabulary words, as well as their English translations, and ask students to match the French vocabulary to the English translations.  Teachers could also create word clouds that contain "hidden" sentences, and ask students to put the sentences together in the correct order.  Finally, if a class is reading a book or poem, the teacher could ask students to enter a chapter of a book or a poem into Wordle to generate a word cloud that includes the most frequently occurring vocabulary words.  A follow-up assignment would then be to translate the vocabulary.

I enjoyed the iGoogle activity.  I liked searching through the gadgets and was surprised to see how many gadgets are available.  At first I thought this would be a great tool to use to build a classroom homepage.  After thinking through it more, however, I prefer to use a blog since it is more interactive and I can link to the specific web pages I want.  I think that having the students create their own iGoogle pages, however, would be a great assignment.  I could specify the types of gadgets I want them to include.  From the perspective of a French class, I would ask that they include gadgets for a French word of the day, a French/English dictionary, and French news sites.  Students could choose the news sites they want to include from a list I provide.  Articles from these sites could provide the basis for journal entries and presentations.  I think iGoogle presents many possibilities for world language learning, since there are so many websites today that focus on world languages.