Word Clouds

I have by now written two or three blog posts on this great tool and I wanted to share them here as well as some other great posts by colleagues who have written some great stuff on word clouds.

My original post was Techtools & Pedagogy - Word Clouds and in this post I tried to compare the different tools which are freely available on the web as well as suggest some classroom uses

Here is a word cloud made from the first few paragraphs of that post (made with Wordle)

A lesson plan using a word cloud showing how to integrate reading and writing was written later:

Using word clouds in class – a lesson plan

More recently, I presented these ideas on two online conferences - you can view the slides from my second presentation here

Many colleagues have asked me "What's with Word clouds, can't we just use our board?"

Of course, we can use our board if we have no internet access or have not had the time to prepare one online!

Or a slide on a powerpoint if you prefer, will do just as well.

But some of the word cloud applications make very attractive presentation of the words or phrases you want to show and the nice thing is that, once you show your students, they can use them too!

Here are some further posts

Related Posts by members of my PLN

Using Word Clouds in EFL ESL by Nik Peachey from his Learning Technology blog
Nik Peachey – Easy Web 2.0 tools to use in the classroom – The SEETA online course
Russel Stannard’s video on Wordsift and Wordle
Word Clouds by Jamie Keddie
Wordle for short texts by Jamie Keddie and how to do Screen Captures
12 Word Cloud Resources, Tips & Tools post by Shelly Terrell
43 interesting ways to use Wordle in the classroom – post by Tom Barrett

This last powerpoint by Tom Barrett will be especially appealing to members of this ning who are not EFL/ESL oriented and are looking for some new great ideas!

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