Ontario Election 2011 Words

Welcome back! I hope that you all had a nice summer.

The big news in Ontario this fall is the provincial election. TV Ontario (TVO) has lots of good information about Ontario elections and voting here. (All links will open in a new window.)

Do you know who you are going to vote for? If you can't vote in THIS election, who would you vote for? Do you think it is important for people who live in Canada and cannot vote to think about this question?

Word clouds are a a way of analyzing a document. One way of making a word cloud is to paste the text into Wordle. Words that are used most often show up larger and brighter. It can give you an idea about the content of a document. Here is one I made from the lyrics of the song Summertime:

I couldn't get Wordle to work on my computer so I used TagCrowd. You can find other options here. Check out WordSift if you want to do word analysis as well. Very cool.

Here are the word clouds that Mark Brosens of TVO's The Agenda made from the election platforms of the 

Ontario Liberal Party,

Ontario New Democratic Party,

Ontario Progressive Conservative Party and the

Ontario Green Party.

Look at the 4 word clouds. Did you learn anything new about what each party thinks is best for Ontario? Do these word clouds help you decide which party best represents what you think?

What issues are most important to the people in your class? Type them out into a word document. If 5 people think that education funding is an important issue, type education funding 5 times. Copy and paste your document into Wordle. Post a link to your word cloud into the comments so we can see what is important to you.

Then check out what others in Ontario are thinking here: The Citizen's Agenda - Click on a polygon to see a video of the question and issue raised by people who attended the Agenda Camps around Ontario.