@Nancy, your kids get bored with Animoto for the same reason I do: automation isn’t fun after the first round. So we’re only a couple degrees removed from each other.

On a positive note, I haven’t memorized everything you’ve ever done- so your fear that I’m stalking you can diminish slightly.

I keep trying to put my animoto in prezi but I end up getting dizzy and falling down. My coworkers have begged me to stop.

While I certainly do enjoy “the quality of their output,” it’s only because of “the interpretation of their output” that I’d even use Wordle in class; that’s where my judgment of this comes from. But the quality of the output cannot be ignored — you and I both, Dan, have used more than one blog entry to discuss the importance of design in the classroom.

Getting ready to teach a complicated text? Start it off with a word cloud of that text and have students find meaning in the frequency of words. In the middle of a unit? Run a sample essay of the writing style you’re teaching and see what comes up. Finished with something? Debrief as a class, getting each student to contribute a word/sentence which sums up their understanding. Run all those words/sentences through Wordle.

With both of these products, it seems that they suffer from trying to condense long works. What if Wordle was used for only the first few paragraphs of a book? Animoto for just a certain 5 minute segment of video? Would the results be more meaningful then?

Here is one you might actually like– http://zipskinny.com/