This week, in our class discussions about Thanksgiving, the Grade One's came up with lists of the many many many people and things they were thankful for. In an effort to capture their ideas in a visually appealing format, we decided to create Word Clouds to be able to share their thinking with their ever growing readership on our blog. As an educator, I think that word clouds can be used in many curricular areas to display your student's thinking. You can use them for character descriptions in literacy, poetry, an "All about Me", as a brainstorming tool or for synthesis of big ideas in science, social studies, numeracy. The list can go on and on and there are many examples on the internet. I am going to share with you 2 sites that I have found useful to develop visually appealing word clouds with your students on a range of topics.
Wordle is a user friendly word cloud site that easily allows you to convert text to art. Simply click on "Create" and a text box appears for you to start typing your ideas. Leave a space between each word and when you are finished, click "Go" and taa daa, you have a word cloud. If you don't like the colour scheme or layout, click randomize repeatedly until you find a shape or layout you like. Then, save it to the public gallery. You can save it anonymously but you must save it in order to have options for what you would like to do with it. After saving it, you can print it or paste an embed code to another place for display such as a blog or homepage. See my example below or you can also visit my class' blog to see the student's Thanksgiving Wordles at the Cardinal's Nest.
Wordle is a user friendly word cloud site that easily allows you to convert text to art. Simply click on "Create" and a text box appears for you to start typing your ideas. Leave a space between each word and when you are finished, click "Go" and taa daa, you have a word cloud. If you don't like the colour scheme or layout, click randomize repeatedly until you find a shape or layout you like. Then, save it to the public gallery. You can save it anonymously but you must save it in order to have options for what you would like to do with it. After saving it, you can print it or paste an embed code to another place for display such as a blog or homepage. See my example below or you can also visit my class' blog to see the student's Thanksgiving Wordles at the Cardinal's Nest.
Tagxedo is another word cloud site that gives you choice in the style of the clouds. For free, you can choose from 50 cloud styles such as a star, heart, speech bubble, Christmas tree etc... plus for a limited time, you can upload images from your computer to use. This is currently free but these premium or custom options will come with a membership soon.
I like this site because of the versatility. You can customize your word cloud's colour scheme, shape, font, orientation, layout, theme and orientation by using the toolbar to the left of your image. This gives you more control of your word art. Also, when you scroll over your word cloud, you can highlight or emphasize the words you would like. To see the full possibilities of Tagxedo, you MUST check out the Gallery to see what other people have created. There are many options for saving your word cloud: jpeg; png; imgur;html cloud; player or web. The embed code is using silverlight (a web application framework similar to adobe flash) which would require a download to be widely viewed.
Please see my attempt at a self portrait below:
"Me" and "Me in Tagxedo"
I think that these two sites have many applications for students in many curricular areas. I hope that as you try them out, you will share your discoveries and successes by commenting below. Have fun!
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