Word Clouds

Many teachers are already familiar with the delights of Wordle, the online tool for creating tag clouds. Its uses in the classroom are numerous, from creating poems and posters to analysing text, summarising key points or revising for exams. Recently however, I was introduced to Tagxedo, where you have the added advantage of being able to create your word cloud in a pre-determined shape. With this simple-to-use tool you can help young people build their vocabulary on a whole range of topics. The more words they come up with, the more secure the shape. For added fun you can ‘respin’ the colours, layout and fonts for an endless variety of looks. Set it as a group challenge and watch that word bank take off. Here’s an example I created by way of illustration on the subject of ‘Dogs’.

The Wordle is Out!

This is a simple application I’ve discovered recently, and already it’s being used by a great number of people. Like most of the new technology available to us now it’s also entirely free and easy to access and use. A wordle is a graphic representation of a piece of text; I have even heard it described as “word art”. The one at the bottom of the next column is a snapshot of my blog – the more often a word appears in the blog the bigger and more prominent the word in the picture. You get the idea. You key into a box a piece of text or the URL of your blog or web page and a “word cloud” is generated, which can then be downloaded, printed or shared with others. The colour, font and layout of the wordle can be altered with a click of the mouse!

Thanks to digitalmaverick for the presentation below which illustrates the potential of Wordle.

Immediately I can think of a number of uses for this simple device in the classroom. For example:-

• Summarise a discussion by noting the key words, typing them into Wordle and displaying the result on screen
• Create your own poem in Wordle and print out in colour for display in the classroom
• Preview the main themes of a short story or novel by copying and pasting an extract into Wordle and discussing the resulting picture
• Copy and paste a complex examination piece into Wordle to create an immediate summary of the text before looking at the questions in more detail

 I’m sure you can think of more uses of your own. Please share them so that we can build a really useful tool for teachers. Then go create your own at www.wordle.net