I asked students in my French 301 course to send me their unfinished drafts of the final paper. In class, I showed them a Wordle rendition of an article of mine and pointed to the frequency of words. I then showed them what their drafts looked like in Wordle. My goal was to make them more aware of unnecessary repetition, which is frequent in student writing at this level. Then, as a group, we tried to come up with equivalents to the most repeated words.
This post grew out of a Digital Pedagogy Faculty Learning Community attended by Ron Buckmire, Hanan Elsayed, Edmond Johnson, Krystale Littlejohn, and Adrianne Wadewitz and sponsored by the Center for Teaching Excellence and the Center for Digital Learning and Research.