Thing 7: Wordle: step away from the randomize button

I started using Wordle at my previous job (FE college) and got a bit carried away with printing out and creating PDFs of my beautiful Wordle creations.  I first discovered Wordle through Flickr- I must have been looking for some inspiration and came across other people's Wordle creations.  I experimented with them for a bit, trying to create something to help with explaining (or maybe avoiding) Dewey, gaining the idea from what I had seen on Flickr.  See here for example.

I have used them once or twice at Westminster Uni, once for our business blog as a visual representation of the blog posts so far, but I have never used them for anything very imaginative and I like Em's idea of how they could be used in a training session.  

The one above is a representation of feedback from a recent training session I did, asking students to name the most useful part of the session.  The Library Search "e-shelf" feature often seems to be a big hit with the students and its prominence in the feedback confirms this. I forgot how addictive the "randomize" button on Wordle is though, every Wordle that comes up I think, "that's nice but not quite right" and hit randomize again.  I like that it is quite easy to adapt things to how you want it, like getting rid of common english words or having everything in lower-case.  I understand that the Java-ness of it causes some problems for saving it/uploading it.  I avoided all that by taking a screen capture (using faststone screen capture) and saving it as a JPEG.  I then wondered when I uploaded it whether the picture would be clearer if I went down the HTML route (Wordle gives you coding for your picture if you save it to their gallery); I concluded quite soon after that I had done right in the first place as the picture from the HTML made it too small and then grainy if you enlarged.  I'm sure there are ways around this but life's too short to be messing around with HTML coding.  

Thing 7 summary:  I love Wordle as it is so preeeeetty and easy to use.  I could definitely be more imaginative about what I use it for though.  I think if I was a school librarian I would see more potential uses but perhaps I am not thinking hard enough. 

Picture source: words by my business students, picture by Wordle