Another word cloud tool to try

Colleen Wedge shared this word cloud one of her students made. She used a tool called tagul.com.  This particular student is doing dog therapy, so the shape is a nice fit!  Can you see using word clouds within PLPs?

I've written before about word clouds, but it's also good to see what the new tools are.  Here are some ideas on how you can use them:

1. Try pasting in the full text of two presidential candidates' stump speeches.  How do they compare?
2. Make a word cloud from responses to a survey to get a feel for the main points.
3. Add a tag cloud to your blog to see what topics are most often discussed.

More word cloud tools

You probably have seen Wordle, the tool that analyzes text for word frequency, then arranges the words graphically (the Advisory wordle is a good example of this). There are other tools that are similar and are worth a try. Here are two:

Tagxedo is much like Wordle, expect that it allows you to decide the shape of the final image. Here, for example, is our course catalog in the shape of a hawk (note that these screen shots are not as much fun as the online version- try it yourself and you'll see what I mean):


WordSift is not as pretty as the others, but clicking on a word in WordSift brings up images and a visual thesaurus representation. This might be especially useful for ELL students. Again, here's our course catalog:


Unfortunately, neither of these have built-in printing, so you need to take a screen shot if you want them on paper.

Want more? Here's a blog post that discusses other word cloud tools:
http://www.techlearning.com/default.aspx?tabid=67&entryid=364