Wordle.net

megan > smiled become covered chewed drink

Now, what's better than words and a picture to tell a story? Why, a Word Picture or Word Cloud! It is all very easy and free! Basically, you paste text into Wordle.net, the site removes all of the common small words, then it creates these fantastic little word clouds. The larger the word, the more often it occurs in the text. You can change the font, colours and orientation of the words. I find it is a fantastic brainstorming tool, and it is very good for making visual representations of opinions and ideas. Wordle is a great tool to use on-line, or to just print off, laminate and stick it up in the classroom. Think personalized name tags, place mats or class displays. Below is a Google Docs slideshow with a few suggestions for using Wordle word clouds in your classroom practice and below that are several alternatives to Wordle.net, which you may like to try out. **This [|presentation] by Tom Barrett shows [|43 ways to use Wordle in the classroom] while some of these ideas are more suited for american classrooms, he does have quite a few that can be adapted to New Zealand classrooms. I found this presentation on Shelly Terrell's excellent site. You can link to the post here:** media type="custom" key="6770965" align="center"

**Alternatives to Wordle:** Tagxedo.com This word-cloud generator, is a lot more customizable than Wordle.net, however it is not child friendly and I wouldn't recommend it for use with primary students. The big appeal of this site is that it allows you to create an actual shape out of your words. As you can see, I made a dinosaur out of the words on my school website. In order to use this site you must download, Microsoft Silverlight, which you may not want to do (though it is safe but check with your tech person first). Also, it will not work with Chrome, or on older Macs.

WordItOut.com This is a tidy, easy to use generator which you can use with primary and secondary students. The clever thing about WordItOut is that you can set a target for your focus words. You are able to decide where on the page you wish the have the large, most used words. The colours, fonts and margins are all customizable, I like the rainbow colour feature.

Tagul.com Tagul is another generator which allows you to customize the shape of your word cloud. As you can see, I have chosen a star shape. As far as I can tell, you can only use the standard shapes and are unable to up-load custom shapes like Tagxedo. The down side of this site is that you must create an account to use it. Also it is not very student friendly, I would not use this with primary students.

Abcya Word Clouds This site is incredibly easy to use, in fact I would suggest that you could even use it in New Entrant rooms. One surprising thing that you can do with these word clouds is delete individual words from a finished word cloud. There are three different layouts, several colour schemes and fonts. They are very asy to print and will save as a jpeg.

WordSift.com Wordshift is an interesting site, while the word clouds are not very pretty it does have some interesting vocabulary features. Once the word cloud is generated, you are able to choose individual words in the thesaurus tool. You are able to hover over the synonyms in this tool to see their meaning. WordSift also searches for images to match your selected word. I would recommend this generator for senior primary and secondary students. ImageChef.com This is a very fun, simple to use site that generates fantastic looking clouds. While they would like to encourage you to join, with extra features available to members, you can still use this site to generate funky word clouds like my cat to the left. It can handle large text drops and embeds seamlessly to many conventional social-network facilities. I am sure many an intermediate child would love to spice up their ePortfolio using this generator. I could see no easy way to print these cloud, so you would have to use a screen shot programme to create a hard copy. Young students could use this site, how ever there are lots of external links and advertising, so you may not wish to let them loose unsupervised.