Word Clouds

One of my (two dozen or so) New Year's Resolutions is to blog more consistently on the tech blog this year.  This week, let's look at Word Clouds.  

I suggest three sites for creating Word Clouds: Wordle, ABCya and Tagul.

We've been using Word Clouds with our 6th and 8th graders this week.  Cheryl had been looking for an interesting way for the 8th graders to use words, or a quote to accompany the masks they had designed before the break.  I suggested they use Wordle to make a word cloud with their yearbook quotes.  The sixth graders also used Wordle with Dr. Martin Luther King quotes this week.

Wordle is free and offers a dizzying array of font, color and layout options.  The link to Wordle is http://www.wordle.net/create

For the 6th grade project I strung together the words in the Martin Luther King quotes using "~", so the words stay together in sentences:

If you do not link the words together, a cloud is created, as in this sample: 

The idea is that those words that appear the most in a block of text will be represented most in the cloud.

A couple of "lessons learned" for using Wordle:

• Once you have all your text in the box, you will want to copy the whole block of text - just in case something goes wrong, you won't have to retype the whole block of text again.  
• If you press the "back" button, you will lose everything, so again, be sure you have it copied.
• You cannot save Wordle documents to your computer, so they must be printed right away.  If you need to save a copy, a screen shot is a good idea.

A word cloud option for our younger students is: abcya.com:

http://www.abcya.com/word_clouds.htm

This is designed for students in 2nd -5th grades, and while it has fewer font, color and design options, is much easier to navigate - and you can save your work, which is not possible with Wordle. Here are a couple of samples, with thanks to Dr. Seuss:

And a third option, for older students, is Tagul.    On the Knewton blog, I discovered that: "tag clouds are similar to the “word clouds” that many news sites use to show the trending topics; they can scrape a website and pull all the terms that are used, and weight them by how many times they’re used. Tag clouds have one advantage over word clouds, though; they are all separate links to more information. There are several programs that can be used to create these tag clouds — I recommend Tagul because it’s easy to use and free for the first 20 clouds!"

I recommend the Knewton blog entry: Four Ways to Use Tag Clouds in Classroom lessons - I love the ideas, including Valentine's Day vocabulary lists, and ideas for President's Day, Black History month and teaching current events.

I also like The Top 10 Ways to Use Wordle at School This is a great list of ideas, including creating personal narratives, classroom polls, and student profiles.

Enjoy!  MB