Todd's Tuesday Tech Tip #7: Wordle Word Clouds

Hello Colleagues,

Happy Tuesday!

This week's T4 is all about word clouds.

What is a word cloud you might be asking? I found this definition, along with a brief description of the most popular word cloud generator, Wordle.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

 

Here is a video of how to make your own Wordle.

As I said, Wordle is the most well known word cloud generator.  So, what can you do with these word clouds? 

Michael Gorman, of 21st Century Educational Technology and Learning has come up with a list of 108 ways you can use word clouds in the classroom. 

Here are a few of my favorites:

1.  Create a group word cloud of the entire class or sub groups in the class. This could be in reaction to a discussion, an idea, a reading, or video. Students work in groups to come up with 20-30 descriptive words and then make a word cloud. Using advanced tools they could rank them or color code them.

2.  Have a students analyze their frequency of word usage in a writing piece.

3.  Have students write a book review and put it into a word cloud. Find write ups of books and create word clouds to promote a book.

4.  Put words in a word cloud that will be part of spelling tests and vocabulary investigations.

5.  Students create a word cloud to illustrate their favorite artist or musician and do not include the name. They then present word cloud to class and students try to guess. Finish by including their word cloud as part of a poster with a picture of artist/musician, name of artist/musician, and paragraph about him/her.

Here is one last example.  It is actually made using another word cloud program called Tagxedo.  To me, Tagxedo is like Wordle on steroids and it is awesome!  I will go over how to make a word cloud with this program in a future T4.  Here's one I made with fourth graders by soliciting from each of them ten words that describe WGST.  The wordle was then created using the inverse of the letters WGST.  

How could you use Wordle?

Thanks!

Todd