#13 Wordle

Wordle is a simple visual representation tool for producing 'word clouds'.  A 'word cloud' or 'tag cloud' shows the most frequent words in a given text by giving them a larger font size.

Wordle no.1

This is an entirely free tool with no heavy sales pitch or a long list of terms and conditions.  It uses a Java Applet to produce the 'beautiful' clouds.  These can be instantly uploaded to a public gallery for the world to see or printed off.  If you upload under a unique user name it will remember the ones you've uploaded.  Click on the video to see me making a word cloud from text from an essay I wrote.

Text can be copied and pasted easily into the window pane from another source, including a word document or web page or directly from a URL which has a RSS feed.  For example, below is what was created when I took the text from a blog about technology for the classroom:

Wordle no.2

Common words, such as 'the', 'and' etc, and numbers are excluded by default, but can be included, while individual words can be excluded. There are also options for words in different languages.  There are a number of ways to visualise the cloud, using different colour combinations, fonts, choice between upper or lower case and orientation.  Or a user can simply click 'randomize' to bring up different interpretations of the same text.

The tool has been used by worldwide media to report on political speeches - examples here and here, while the tool's creator, Jonathon Feinberg, demonstrated it using the US Constitution. Feinbeg has his own blog about how it gets used and to answer frequent Q&As. There is also a google group of Wordle users.

Wordle no.3

 
Wordle has a relevance to corpus linguistics, according to a presentation given by Tilly Harrison at an iatefl conference, (Cardiff, 2009).  It allows you to analyse authentic texts in terms of frequency of words. It focuses on chunks of text and collocation, such as lexis that might be associated with a certain topic.  It is more visually arresting than wading through concordance lines, which otherwise might show patterns of word usage.  The Idiom Principle (Sinclair, 1991) suggests that a lot of language comes from semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute single choices:

taken from Cowie, A.P. 1999, English Dictionaries for Foreign Learners: A History (Oxford: OUP)

 + Halliday (1991) stated: "Frequency in the corpus is observable evidence of probability in the system"

Wordle no.4

Here are a few of my own ideas for using Wordle:

• Prediction tasks - get students to predict what kinds of words will appear in a newspaper or magazine article, based on the pictures, headline or tagline.  Takes votes on what they think what be the most common ones used. 
• Show some pre-made Wordles to guess a film, book or play.   Then get them to make up sentences, building up from 5-word sentences to 6-word sentences and so on.
• Ask students to find a text on a certain topic and to copy and paste it in and get other students to work out the source from the keywords.
• Students could write up a review or reflection of a task-based exercise into Word or similar and these collated into a wordle to see most common opinions.
• Use it for unscrambling sentences, putting them in correct grammatical order. 
• Use it as a pre-reading task, to predict sentence they are going to see in a text on which the wordle is based.
• Use a 'wordled' paragraph as a basis for a speed writing activity.
• Use a wordle to generate interest for writing an original story.  Get them to feed some ideas into word, make sure common words (the, an, and, etc) are removed and see what proves most popular.
• Use it to learn new vocabulary or collocations. Make a wordle for target vocabulary, get them to collocate unfamiliar ones with ones they know.
• Use it as a basis for a Dictogloss,to practice grammatical structures/summarise a target-language text.

Wordle no.5

There are no real limitations once the images have been created.  Although there is no direct way of downloading your image - Java applets are not permitted to write - once it has been created, all that is needed is a simple screen-capture tool. I use the Windows 7 snipping tool for most things.   Or you could use #12 - Jing, which I reviewed already.  

According to Jonathon Feinberg, there is no limit to using your images in other ways, even as the basis for commercial products, although if your image is saved to the public gallery it could, in theory, be used by others.  He acknowledges you can't moderate or filter Wordle to protect offensive words appearing.  It all depends on the source text, so comon-sense discretion is advised if you are a teacher of a particularly sensitive nature or teaching in a lexis-sensitive context.

Feinberg acknowledges that "most of the problems people encounter with Wordle are due to its dependence on the Java Runtime Environment, or just "Java" for short. Java is both a programming language and an enormous piece of software that lets you run programs written in that language" (Sep 2011).  See more on this on his blog.

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Key to above Wordles: 

1. Most commonly used words in a 'Lexis and Grammar' essay on the phrase 'public interest'.
2. Text came from Nik Peachey's Scoop.It! blog on  20 Feb 2012.
3. A visual representation of my blog entry for #7 MailVu. 
4. A visual representation of my blog entry for#10 Quest Garden.
5. A  #1 'Today's Meet' class discussion on the merits or otherwise of the virtual reality website, Second Life, with timings and student names removed first.

Here is a Slideshare Presentation from EFL teacher and MA student, Dave Dodgson:

Using wordle in the language classroom

For a webinar on this click here. Thanks to David Dodgson for sending me this.   

#12 Jing

What is it? What does it do?

Jing is a brilliant screen-capture tool, with a lovely design and integrated features which enables recordings to be shared easily.  It can be used by teachers and students alike for demonstrations, presentations and, most interestingly, for providing feedback. 

Once Jing is downloaded from screen-capture specialists, TechSmith, a bright orange sun sits on your computer screen ready for you to capture anything you want.  Select the size of the window that you want to share and start recording.  Anything you do or show within the window is captured. You can talk over the recording (microphone input) or take sound that is playing from your computer (stereo mix).  
Or you can simply capture an image.

 This video was made using Camtasia Studio 7, another Techsmith product.

Jing is entirely free, although I do recommend purchasing the inexpensive 'Pro' version, which allows for Webcam recording, saving in MPEG-4 format and instant sharing on YouTube and 10 x times as much storage space (20GB) on the server.

Screen Capture of a screen capture

Once a video capture has been made it can be instantly viewed or shared via screencast.  Uploading is quick and sharing is easy because as soon as the video is processed an automatic link is copied and pasted to your computer's clipboard.  This can then be included in an email, placed in a document or anything you are sharing with a potential viewer.   You can also set the share option to send you back an 'embed
code' for inserting directly into a blog or other webpage.

Note: Jing also has its own blog, which details the history of the Jing Project, and has news, advice and more.

Relevance to language learning?

Jing has major relevance for being used both in and out of the classroom.  It is probably the most useful tool for ELT available right now, having many articles written about it and is the most popular video on Russell Stannard's TeacherTrainingVideos.com. 

Grammar feedback

One critical area which has so far not been discussed much, with the previous 11 tools, is that of feedback.  Screen capture software such as Jing enables a teacher to actually take students' work (for example, an essay they have written), do a commentary on it and visually point to any errors on screen.  The capture is not limited by size because the teacher can scroll up and down the work, highlighting, changing or whatever is needed to clarify where a student has gone right or wrong.  This is much more powerful feedback than simply scrawling comments, in different coloured ink, on a students' paper, hoping that they understand what it says.   It can provide better quality and in-depth feedback in a motivating way.  In addition, the teacher can control the amount of feedback given which would be different if a teacher had a face-to-face chat with each student about their work. Finally, a student can replay any link repeatedly in their own time until they understand, rather than pretending they have understood at the time of the feedback. Therefore, it potentially saves loss of face for both teacher and, especially, student.

It also has huge possibilities for students to build upon what they have been taught in class time.  By giving the tool to the students, they can practice new vocabulary, use it more effectively in context and produce work that is easily shareable or able to be assessed.

How can it be used?

The possibilities are almost endless for how Jing can be used in ELT.  The key point to remember, when asking the students to use it, is to build in a structure or framework for using it during class, such as pre-teching vocabulary, showing examples or practicing techniques.  Here are a few examples of how Jing can be used:

Teacher -> Student

•  Show websites for the students to go to.
•  Demonstrate how to search for and use something on the Internet.
•  Highlight the pronunciation of words in a vocabulary list.
• Demonstrate general grammar points or regular mistakes which a class are making.
• Give advice on writing structure, e.g. paragraphing and cohesion.
• Giving feedback (as stated above) on individual students' pieces of work.  
• Correct students' work or give guidance to the student for them to correct their own work.
• Show model answers and give explanations as to why they are.

Idea: Get students to do sport commentaries in pairs

Student -> Teacher

• Submit speaking homework/assignments, following a classroom activity.
• Talk about a picture or photograph they have taken, again following a classroom activity. They can use their mouse to point to different elements.
• Present a timeline of their life (for older students) or describing their family (younger students).
• Using a webcam, perform an interview or role-play (in pairs).
• Used as a reflection tool by students to record their thought progress when doing an activity or over an entire course. 
• Using a webcam to perform a 'show and tell' style speaking exercise - e.g. 'this is an award I won for being the best swimmer in my year at school'.
• Commentating on a sports clip. e.g. of their favourite football team scoring a goal, or on a tennis match, in which one plays the commentator and the other one is the summariser.  These terms are intresting, as in the classroom, you could try to elicit the difference between the two.
•  Voicover - a lot of fun can be generated from getting pairs or groups of students to do a voiceover in one style of a TV or movie clip which has an entirely different style.   I give the examples of the 'Dubbed Hitler' set of clips, taking sequences from the movie, 'Downfall', and producing a 'mashup' of different styles to comic effect.  Star Wars, Star Trek and other sci-fi greats are often targets for this kind of exercise. Students could be shown examples and then they could go and make their own, turning the volume down on the clip and creating their own soundtrack!  Can be varied depending on culture, level etc.

What limitations are there?

There are no limitations really for the numbers of ways that Jing can be used.  Giving individual feedback , as described above, can be quite time-consuming so, despite the benefits, teachers may be reluctant to spend time using it.

The tool, however, only allows, five minutes of recording time for each capture.  The free version also restricts saving the video in SWF (flash) video format only and 2GB worth of free space.  Check the Techsmith website for up-to-date news on this as might be changing soon.