What are WordClouds?
WordClouds are an application which deconstructs text and puts it into a visual representation. In a nut shell, it takes your words and puts it into a picture.
Reasons to use Word Clouds:
- Pre-Reading: Skimming through text looking for key words, headings and pictures is a great pre-reading strategy. However if the text is dense, searching for keywords is difficult. Students paste text into a Word Cloud, and the application will display more frequent words larger.
- Pre-Writing Strategy: this is a great place for students to organize and brainstorm their ideas around writing.
- Post Reading: Generating a list of words which summarizes the text and placing into a Word Cloud.
- During Writing: Students place their expository writing into a Word Cloud, and see if the main idea is apparent.
- Post Writing: The word cloud, in itself, can be a visual representation about their ideas.
Several years ago, with the WWP program we started using word clouds in our classes. Students access sites such as wordle.net or tagxedo.com to create word art. As we have moved into using the iPads in our classes, some of the sites, we previously used, do not work with iPads. Remember iPads do not run Flash or Silverlight.
So what can students use instead?
Word It Out:
Students can edit colour and text- no maximum on words added
Tagul:
- requires students to sign up with an email account (use learn60 , but user name should not be their full name ie: ToniT14 or tthompson14)
- can edit colour and text
- can choose shape
- more features available
Festisite
- limited words meant more for sentences
- shapes are either spiral, heart or waves
http://www.festisite.com/text-layout/