Using Word Clouds in the Classroom
By Kris Walsh

     Many of you have seen and are familiar with word clouds. They are a relatively new and interesting way of looking at a collection of words, and if used in a creative format, a great way to gain insight about a particular collection of words. The collection of words can come from anywhere. It can be from a text that you are reading, someone can take minutes from a class discussion, student writing, webpages, a brainstorming session.... the options are endless. In this edition of Techy Tuesday, I am going to show you how to make a word cloud and give a few ideas for classroom use.

     Making word clouds is fairly straightforward. There is a free web tool called Wordle that is used to create the clouds. The site is www.wordle.net.  It is a user friendly site, and no account is required. You can create a word cloud in 2 main ways. 

1. You can copy and paste existing text. If you have access to a webpage, document, or other digitally available text, you can copy the text, and then paste it into the box under the "create" tab on the front page.

2. You can also compose text directly in the create box. This could be used during class brainstorming sessions or group discussions.

     After the text is entered into the box, click go. The more text there is in the cloud, the longer the process will take. Then an image of your word cloud will appear. 

     If you want to tweak your word cloud, you can do that as well. There are options at the top of the window that allow you to select the color, font, layout, and if the word cloud leaves out common words (and, the, is...) when you chose an option, your word cloud is instantly remade.  When you are happy with the results, you can print the cloud or save it as a .pdf. Both options are under the print menu. When you click the print button, instead of printing, there is an option to save the document as a .pdf.

 

     What makes word clouds useful is that the program counts the amount of times that a word appears in the text and adjusts the size accordingly. The more times a word occurs, the larger the word appears. Depending upon your purpose, you can see what the most important ideas are in the text. You can use this in many different ways. If you are making something with a particular purpose in mind, and you want the main idea to be larger, just type it in a few extra times. Also, you can use the "~" character between words or phrases that you want to keep together. (it won't show up in the cloud. ex common~denominator would keep the words together in the cloud but the ~ would not appear.)

 

Ideas for using Word Clouds in your class

 

     This looks cool, but so what? How is this useful? I have seen some teachers using in their classrooms to make rosters and decorations for their rooms. This is a neat use, but wordles have other uses too. Here are some ideas that I found on the net. There are countless uses; I am just highlighting the most interesting.

 

1. A cool getting to know you project: Kids can enter their name (multiple times to make it bigger) and then list several interests that they have. 

2. Self-esteem boost: Students pass around a sheet of paper with each of their names on it. Everyone has to write something positive about the other students in the class. These sheets can be collected and used to create word clouds about each student.

3. Share information about standards, rubrics, class rules and norms or other important criteria. Copy and paste into wordle, quick and easy!

 

4. Represent your course syllabus, mission statement in a visual way.

 

5. Copy and paste student writing to highlight words that are frequently used. An interesting way to see and talk about word use.

 

6. Find texts of major speeches and paste them into wordle to show the main ideas of the speech.

 

7. Lots of great ways to explore vocab. Have students create a wordle about a new word before it is taught and then have them recreate a wordle after the work is taught to see how the cloud changes.

 

8. Compare and contrast: Create different wordles from 2 or more different texts about the same topic and you can see what each author found important. The site where I found this idea suggested looking at news articles about the same event from different news agencies.

9. Classroom polls: Can be used at any grade level, you can ask your students a question and enter it as they say it, more votes equals bigger text.

10. Making predictions: Give students a cloud made of text pasted from a work of fiction and have them make predictions based on that information. For non-fiction, have students make up a title based on the cloud.

11. Analyze literary character traits: Similar to polls, have a class or small group discussion about a character or other concept and create a cloud based on how often a trait is mentioned.

12. Paste the entire text of a picture book to do a word walk with students to introduce a new text to students.

13. Create KWL wordless: Students can brainstorm what they already know about a topic, what they want to know and later what they have learned. Create a wordle for each list and compare them.

 

     I could go on with more ideas, but this is a good list to get you started. Give it a try! If you have any questions or problems know that we are here to help! I found most of these ideas on this slideshare, http://www.mbcurl.me/9TE8.

 

A word cloud of this blog entry. Can you find the main ideas?