It might just be me, but wordle just seems one of those gimmicky things that looks cool but doesn't really serve any purpose. I don't know how much good it does in terms of developing vocabulary retention. Did I mention it looks cool though? ;-)

I've been using Wordle for years and have found it really useful. Here are some of the ways I've used it and a few ideas you could try: http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com/2008/09/using-word-clouds-in-efl-esl.html

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I've only fiddled around with this a little bit, so thanks for bringing it to my attention again. Does it really promote vocabulary acquisiton, I wonder?

Nice topic, asligokturk!

I was just about to post some information about that wonderful tool, but anyway I'm happy I can contribute sth to your subject:)

It's really cool, wonderfully-looking and it really has some opportunities to improve. It really invigorates our routine tasks. I'd give a link to Mr.Peachey's blog, but he himself provided them. There are numerous activities using this tool and I appreciate his work very much.

Maybe I'd just add one technological point. To use wordle you need an up-to-date software like java (it didn't start at once on my win XP) and  if you want to really cut/paste it everywhere, you need some additional software. And yes: the search engine on the site isn't great.

Thanks a lot for your responses. I have asked my students to prepare word clouds for specific target words. Each pair was asked to include right orthography, part of speech, meanings (variant meanings), meaning associations (antonyms, synonyms), and collocations. They presented their word clouds to one another and we posted their work on the walls. Their feedback was positive.

I see what DavidVincent questions; "does it really promote vocabulary acquisition". Well I think it can be studied empirically but the very same thing is theoretically applies to nearly all practices; (we/students think IT works does it really work?). My evidence relies on students' response not statistical data. But I do also believe that Wordle has potential. E.g. asking students to generate a word cloud from a short poem could be a change to recycle sentence structure and specific grammar forms as exemplified by Nik Peachey. Many thanks go to Nik Peachey for the suggested links, Mike le Prof regarding his contribution on the technical sides and Naomishema for the suggestion of another word cloud application, Tagxedo. Also, thanks for raising your concern Adam and BigMerv; If we all agreed, world would be a boring place J