Wordle Meme

So, my friend, Melanie, tagged me with a meme. I'm usually not one that follows through with this sort of thing, and to be quite honest with you, I rarely give it a second thought. But, I share an office with Melanie and today I overheard her and Jenny talking, and realized not only did Jenny not ignore the meme, but she had the nerve to actually do her own last night! Good grief, now I knew I had to reread Melanie's post and at least give the meme another thought. The Wordle meme really did look quite cool, so without really committing, I decided to check out the site. Of course, only minutes later my meme was complete, I had saved the code, and pasted it here in my blog to share with you. I guess my competitive edge got the best of me and now that it is done, I can say, it really is quite unique.

What are my reflections? I feel relieved that shopping is not top on my list--sorry Melanie--but that students, student, teacher, work, working, and classroom are. After all, students and teachers are at the core and heart of my work. In addition, I'm sure that my math friends will be quite pleased--notice in the middle of the meme that math and reading are side by side, and math is so much bigger than reading! (My math friends have teased often that I've crossed over to the dark side, so maybe now they won't make that claim.) I'm wondering why writing isn't bigger so I'm going back to take a look at my blog titles to see if my math passion really has me blogging about math so much more than reading, writing, and science. And, I'm curious about the wordle meme shape, looks a bit like a space shuttle, doesn't it? I like Melanie's idea that this Wordle Meme would be a great tool for students to use on their blogs to identify their word choices. I also think teachers may find it helpful to analyze their topics. Do their passions shine through without them knowing about it, like my math passion did?

I am tagging the following people to join in by contributing Wordle uses in the classroom and getting into the habit of “wordling” to document their “Zeitgeist”:
1. Melissa Ross and Carrie McLeod
2. Jessica Lipsky
3, Debbie Harbour
4. Maria Mallon and Cheryl Dillard
5. Thomas Ruark

I think this group will really appreciate this quick and easy meme and I can't wait to see which words appear most often in their blogs. So here goes my tagged friends...

Wordle Meme:
1. Create a Wordle from our blog's RSS feed.
2. Blog it and describe your reaction. Any surprises?
3. Tag others to do the same.
4. Be sure to link back here and to where you were first tagged.
5. Create different Wordle clouds of your blog's RSS over a period of time. Do it once a month for the next year.
6. Save your Wordle screenshots in a special folder on your computer or even better create a set on Flickr to store your archived clouds. See what story your Wordle clouds tell as you compare them to each other. Start documenting your “Zeitgeist” (Spirit of the Times) as mentioned by Chris Betcher in his K-12 Online Conference presentation I like Delicious Things. An Intoduction to Tagging and Folksonomies
7. Share other uses (at least one) you have found for Wordle (for your students or personally) to your blog post.