In Class last Thursday we were required to create a word cloud about what we thought about technology. Now what is a "word cloud" you ask? A word cloud is a visual representation of user-generated electronic tags or keywords that classify and describe online content. Typically a word cloud is a group of words in different font sizes and colour or provide links to other information.
My Word Cloud Experience
The website I choose to use to create my word cloud was Wordle. It was (for the most part) easy and quick to use, but I did have some minor troubles with it. For starters in order to share my Wordle, I had to create it, take a screenshot, save it, crop it, save it as an image and then I could share it. It was somewhat a tedious process, but thankfully it wasn't too difficult to figure out. In addition once you input your words to create the Wordle, you can't go back and edit them. So a word of advice if you choose to use wordle: once you input your words be sure to copy them before creating your Wordle that way you can go back and edit if you need to!
All-in-all making a word cloud was pretty fun! It was an interesting way to share what I as a pre-service teacher thought about technology. Here's what mine looks like!
Wordle is one of many word cloud generators available on-line, others that I know of include; WordItOut, Tagul, Tagxedo.
Class Room Uses
In class we were brainstorming ways that we could use word clouds in the classroom with our students and we came up with quite a few ideas! Some of them were; to introduce or conclude a unit, use as exit slips, introduce new vocabulary, or to review classroom rules. One suggestion that our professor gave us was to use it as a way of analysing or summarizing an article (there is sometimes an option to enter a URL of a website). Out of curiosity I typed in the URL to my blog to see if it worked and this is what I got!
My advice is to try out word clouds out and see what you can come up with...it's surprisingly fun!
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| http://tagul.com/ |
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| http://worditout.com/ |
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| http://www.tagxedo.com/ |
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| http://www.wordle.net/ |
Class Room Uses
In class we were brainstorming ways that we could use word clouds in the classroom with our students and we came up with quite a few ideas! Some of them were; to introduce or conclude a unit, use as exit slips, introduce new vocabulary, or to review classroom rules. One suggestion that our professor gave us was to use it as a way of analysing or summarizing an article (there is sometimes an option to enter a URL of a website). Out of curiosity I typed in the URL to my blog to see if it worked and this is what I got!
My advice is to try out word clouds out and see what you can come up with...it's surprisingly fun!
Until my next post... JD
Good overview of word clouds - doing it for your blog is a neat way to look at the concepts and focus of the posts.
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