Many children struggle with vocabulary. Rote memorization is ineffective for the most part. Students seem to remember what they explore and use, while having fun and exploring ways to use their new knowledge. Word clouds engage students as no vocab lists can. Check these:
Wordle - generate “word clouds” from text that you provide; change fonts, layouts, color schemes; print or save them
Tagul - each word becomes a link to a website, while making shapes
Hints for Tagul from Shelly Terrell: "I use Tagul when I want to have each of the words in a cloud lead to a link with more information or to have them in a specific shape such as a heart, star, rectangle, or regular cloud. If a student has written a research paper, this may be a fun way to have them provide the links of several websites they discovered that lead to more information on a topic. You can also use this as a tag cloud for your blog like I did here. Click on any word and it will lead to one of my posts!" See the notes about customizing the links on her blog.
WordSift - clouds with more options to sort words by frequency and alphabetically; not as visually appealing
ImageChef - "Now anyone can create a custom image without any technical knowledge or advanced tools. Modify text in a variety of image templates to create professional quality images with your own personal touch. Once you customize an image, you can e-mail it to a friend directly from within the ImageChef site along with an extra text message. You can also now quickly place images so they can be seen on a 3rd party services such as MySpace, Hi5 and Blogger. Simply, register for an account, and after you personalize an image you can preview different image sizes. HTML is then provided for you to paste directly into your blog post or comment! "
Word it Out - can embed this, change the cloud shape, and differentiate the font colors; easy to customize
Word Mosaic - make word clouds that fit a shape like a circle, question mark, or star.; can embed
Tech Tools & Pedagogy– Word Clouds - from Marisa Constantinides’ - a comparison chart that lists the options for each of the word cloud tools and shows you visual examples of each
ABC ya! - visually pleasing; choose different fonts and font colors; edit your text, because this catches all common words and symbols
Clusty Cloud Creator - type in a topic and a word cloud is generated; do not get to choose the text; the words are links to searches of the terms
Tweet Cloud - makes word clouds from your tweets or from topics and hashtag
Wispy - word clouds from your own words; also generates clouds for Twitter and Facebook accounts
Word Clouds in the Classroom:
Guess the Wordle - wiki features several Wordles where students use their problem solving skills to guess the word or phrase; students may contribute and try to guess the other’s Wordle
52 Interesting Ways to Use Wordle in the Classroom from Tom Barrett
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