Word Clouds

WHAT ARE WORD CLOUDS?

A fun way to show words!  Words are art!

Created on Wordle

A word cloud is an attractive arrangement of randomly positioned words, where the most important words are bigger than the others.  Word clouds visually represent the frequency or importance of a word in a given text.   As you can see in President Obama's Inauguration speech that someone created a word cloud from.  Example:  President Obama's Inauguration Speech Created from Wordle

Word clouds can be used for educational and fun purposes.  You can place them on your blog, website, social networking site.  You can also print them automatically onto items: a great idea for making custom gifts - printing on T-shirts.   They are a fantastic tool to summarize large documents (reports, speeches, questionnaires, etc), as well as websites.

There are various websites available on the Internet to create word clouds.  Word clouds can be created from sentences, whole documents, web addresses and on some websites even from tables.

Read article on ways to utilize a word cloud:  Click Here 

More ideas for the classroom:  Click Here

WORD CLOUD WEBSITES WE WILL VISIT/EXPLORE

Wordle

Tagul

Tagexdo

TagCrowd

ToCloud

Textorizer

Word Sift

Text Tag Cloud

Image Chef

Worditout

ABCya Word Clouds


Famous Speeches: Enter the text of a famous historical speech into Wordle. Analyze the results by looking at the most commonly used words, or even the words that are not used. What does this tell us about the orator and their intentions? Go to http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/previous.htm or http://www.americanrhetoric.com/top100speechesall.html for a list of historical speeches you may want to get started with.

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Activity

Create a word cloud on Wordle.net
Create a post

• Description of tool
• Example of a wordle that you created - (take a snap shot)
• Link to wordle website
• Explain the word cloud that you created

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