Word-Clouds

= Word Cloud Generators = //** Using Word Clouds in the Classroom **//

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**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.
 * Website Address: www.wordle.net**

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 * How to Take a Screen Shot of a Wordle You Make -**

http://take-a-screenshot.org

**Tagxedo**
This free tool requires no login accounts, and has the additional bonus of offering educators the chance to save their word clouds in a variety of different jpeg resolutions. The user interface is clear and well organized. You will have no trouble customizing your fonts, colors, and layouts due to the easy one click selection process. Shapes can also be used in Tagxedo.
 * Website Address** - www.tagxedo.com

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**Word it Out**
www.worditout.com
 * Customize settings to
 * Create word clouds from sentences, whole documents, web addresses or tables.
 * Decide how to filter that text, which words to display or remove, and tweak their importance with ease.
 * Design your word cloud as you like, find that perfect layout, choose your own colors, fonts and sizes (and how to mix them), or let WordItOut find a random look for you!
 * Keep control of your word clouds
 * Share your word cloud with the world (or keep it secret!)
 * Easily embed them on your own website (as big or small as you want)
 * Download your own copy as an image file

**Tag Crowd**
This word cloud service does not show more than 150 words. You can set it to show even less. You can also set it so that a word has to appear a minimum number of times in a document to even show up in the word cloud.
 * @http://tagcrowd.com/**

**ABC-YA**
@http://www.abcya.com/word_clouds.htm This word cloud generator is designed for elementary students. It has a very clean format that is easy to follow.

Ways to Use Word Clouds
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 * 38 Interesting ways to use wordle in your classroom - this is a google docs presentation.
 * []
 * [[file:Uses of Wordle.pdf]]
 * The attached PDF document from [|www.teachit.co.uk] has some fantastic ideas for using Wordle in the classroom.

**Examples**
1. Definition of Art - @http://period1tok.blogspot.com/2010/02/what-is-art.html

Lesson Ideas
1. __**Personal Narratives**__: Write, or copy and paste, a personal narrative into Wordle. Students will be able to see what is important to their peers from the words that are produced from the Wordle word clouds. Compare the words that are used most often by boys, or girls, by age group, or by class/grade level. These Wordle lessons make great displays outside a classroom.

2. **__Famous Speeches__**: Enter the text of a famous historical speech into Wordle. Analyze the results by looking at the most commonly used words, or even the words that are not used. What does this tell us about the orator and their intentions? Go to @http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/previous.htm or @http://www.americanrhetoric.com/top100speechesall.html for a list of historical speeches you may want to get started with.

3. __**Create a Wordle Gift**__: Mother's Day, Father's Day, Grandparent's Day, or even Teacher Appreciation Day, can all be celebrated with Wordle. Input your favorite adjectives for your chosen person, generate the word cloud, and add it to a greeting card, poster, calendar, or whatever else you choose. Remember, Wordle clouds can be downloaded as JPEGS or PNGS if you take a screenshot of your word cloud and save it to your computer, (command+shift+4 on a Mac will give you the option of saving a selcted portion of your screen).

4. __**Classroom Polls**__: Instead of your traditional bar graph or pictograph, try using Wordle to organize your data. What is the favorite color in your class? Have all students take turns at entering their favorite color in to Wordle and generate the resulting cloud. Bigger words = more popular colors. Repeat with ice cream flavors, pets, family members, etc.

5. **__Compare and Contrast__**: Use Wordle as a compare and contrast tool. Compare and contrast the word clouds of two or more students' writing, famous speeches, song lyrics, news reports, book reviews or whatever else you may need to compare in your classroom studies.

6. **__Student Profiles__**: Have all students in your class write a few positive adjectives about each of their classmates anonymously. Compile all the papers, input the adjectives for each student into Wordle, and generate a student profile word cloud to give back to the student. Children always enjoy this positive feedback exercise, and it can be a great end of year activity to take home from the last day of school.

7. __**Current Affairs Analysis**__: Copy and paste a news story into Wordle. What could the story have been about? Can you guess what the headline would have been? Where could have it taken place? These questions and more make this a worthy discussion exercise.

8. __**Wordle Word Walls**__: Brighten up your word walls with Wordle lessons. Students can brainstorm synonyms, antonyms, or definitions for their list of vocabulary words. Add your word clouds to your existing word wall work to help stimulate those higher thinking skills in your students. Keep a tally of the targeted vocabulary words that the children use in speech on a daily basis, and them to a Wordle cloud to show which are used most often.

9. **__Unit Review/Preview Posters__**: Students can create KWL charts on what they would like to learn and find out about a given topic. Alternatively, create word clouds at the end of a unit to summarize the key learning points or vocabulary from a given topic.

10. **__Historical Document Analysis__**: Have you ever wondered what the Magna Carta or Declaration of Independence would look like when pasted into Wordle? Try it and see. There will be lots of talking points from the resulting word cloud. What do you predict you will see? What themes can you identify? How does the word cloud fit in with the historical context of the document?

11. **__Use as a Prediction Tool__** - Each student adds a word to create a comprehensive cloud of thoughts based on a book/poem title. The cloud can be referred to at the end of the reading and a new one can be created for comparison.

12. **__Create a Key-Word Cloud__.** - At the beginning of a Unit.

13. **__Genre__-** Create a range of of clouds from different Genres and have students identify which is which based on the words in the clouds.

14. **__Character Cloud__** - Groups create character cloud which is then passed onto a second group who have to identify which character is being described.

15. __**Quotation Work**__ - Cloud a quotation, then get students to vote on which of the words are most important for learning about the character/theme - this will enable word level analysis.

16. **__Newspaper__** - Paste an article into wordle and issue to students. They are to identify the gist of the story and re-write it based on their thoughts.

17. __**Word/sentence level analysis**__ - Paste a long text/poem to create a cloud. Identify which words have been omittted and discuss why they have been left out.. What difference does it make? Should they still be added? How do those words affect the reading?

18. __**Teaching About Bullying**__ - It can be used for a discussion on bullying. Have the students each create a list of words that describe a "friend" and a list that describes a "bully". Take all of their words and create a "friend" Wordle and a "bully" Wordle. Then, make a classroom poster that has each Wordle on it and in big text has the question "Which one are You?". Have it posted on the classroom door so everytime they leave the classroom, they see this question.

There are a lot of fun and interesting things you can do with Wordle lessons in the classroom. Challenge your students to come up with some uses of their own!

Thanks to @http://jenuinetech.com, @http://peterpappas.blogs.com, and @http://ictlearning.net for their innovations with Wordle in education.

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