Conquering Chromebooks: Word Clouds
My Three Favorite (from the simplest to most complex)
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AnswerGarden provides you with a incredibly simple, yet surprisingly powerful way to quickly create a world cloud with a group of people. Create your AnswerGarden, share it with people, and then use it to brainstorm, get feedback from a class, review concepts. The possibilities are endless! |
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ABCya.com word clouds for kids! Type or paste text into the box below and press the arrow button to view the word cloud generated. The appearance of a word cloud can be altered using the graphical buttons above the cloud. It is also easy to save and/or print the cloud by simply pressing a button. A portion of this project is released under a BSD license - click here to learn more. Super simple and great for really quick word clouds. |
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Tagul is the ultimate in word cloud creation! You can use your words to form shapes and they provide many great tools for editing your word cloud. You must login before you can create a Tagul, but students can use their Google accounts to create their login. |
Helpful Links
10 Tips and Tools to Teach Using Word Clouds
108 Ways to Use Word Clouds in the Classroom
Teaching Strategy for Reading in Any Subject: Word Clouds
This is a great video from Teaching Channel.com
40 Interesting Ways To Use Word Clouds For Learning
Other Word Cloud Creation Tools
| Word it Out | Much like Wordle, it creates word clouds out of any text that you paste into the text box. This application allows the word cloud to be customized by size, font, and color scheme. Word It Out also allows the user to ignore certain words and thus keeps them out of the word cloud. Can be used without a login, although the saving option requires an email. Can work around this option by right clicking to save as jpeg and/or screen print. |
| Word Sift | This hidden gem from Stanford University doe not give the pretty effects of Wordle, but does give several awesome features that allow students to really analyze a word cloud. One unique feature allows words to be listed by how common or rare they are. Also allows for words to be listed in alphabetical order. Wordsift allows the user to click on words to view in an online visual thesaurus with dictionary, google images, and word sentence placement. It even allows the user to view words by subject area and cross curricular areas by unique color coding and definitions that relate to specific disciplines.
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| Make Word Mosiac | It allows for different shapes, colors, and fonts. It makes a real cool word cloud but may have limited use in the classroom. Items can be emailed and embedded in different social network forums. By pressing the more button you can save a jpeg. Larger images with higher resolutions are available for a price. May not be a good choice for younger students. |
| VocabGrabber | VocabGrabber analyzes any text you're interested in, generating lists of the most useful vocabulary words and showing you how those words are used in context. Just copy text from a document and paste it into the box, and then click on the "Grab Vocabulary!" button. VocabGrabber will automatically create a list of vocabulary from your text, which you can then sort, filter, and save. Select any word on the list and you'll see a snapshot of the Visual Thesaurus map and definitions for that word, along with examples of the word in your text. Click on the word map or the highlighted word in the example to see the Visual Thesaurus in action. |
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Google Doc Add-on |
Tag Cloud Generator creates a tag cloud in the side bar from any Google Docs document that contains more than 50 words. Use this add-on to quickly assess what your emerging theme is, how to best categorize your document, or if it is someone's else's document - find out the theme of the document without reading it. Stopwords are automatically removed.
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