Wordle: Beyond the Novelty

I've always enjoyed a good Wordle...they get right to the point, they're very visual (like me) and frequently colorful.  It's always nice to see them around school.  I always thought (as do most people I know) that Wordle was a great 'creative' tool for kids to see their work in another way or to design sharp-looking printables.


Basically, Wordle takes text from the location  you point it to (pasted text, a website, a delicious link) and makes it into a sassy Word Cloud (the level of sassiness is customizable), but more importantly, the more times a word shows up in the text, the larger it shows up in a wordle.  So in this Blog entry, Wordle is going to be the largest word since I typed Wordle many, many times.

Lately, however, I've realized the great possibility of Wordle.  One fantastic use that I got emailed to me was feedback from adult training sessions.  Rather than sending a long email with 30 people's comments (that would have largely been echoing similar sentiments), I received a Wordle, that let me see what people thought quickly and easily.  


I was thinking last week that when students are researching a topic, a Wordle might be just the tool to use to help them get at the main point quickly.  Students freqently get overwhelmed when reading a large volume of information online- especially when they are exposed to it for the first time.  If they copied and pasted that text into Wordle, they would be able to see the main points of the article (since they would be the largest words), and could focus their attention there.  


How else do you use Wordle (with adults or kids)?