Another identified technology in a faculty project that has interesting uses for teaching is wordle.

A “wordle” is a word cloud or a word collage that you make on the web site http://www.wordle.net/ The more often a word is used in a given block of text, the larger it appears in the cloud of words. You can paste in text and make you word clouds from any source.  Wordle can also provide a list of words used in the text pasted and show how often that word is used.

The example above shows the words from the Faculty Support Services web site.

What may seem like a visual toy can be used to quickly evaluate documents in a new way.    Comparing the words used in different documents and the words used most often can illuminate themes and foster discussion, all while being interactive and fun to use.