This blog post offers tips on using Wordle — a tool for creating word clouds from text — as part of lessons. Wordle can be used to highlight traits of main characters as part of a book project or as a tool for editing to show students when they are overusing certain words, according to the post. Edutopia.org/Lisa M. Dabbs’ blog
Wordle – Probably the oldest and most popular of the word cloud creators. Word clouds can then be edited w/ different fonts, colors, and layouts, and even shared w/ others online.- Tagxedo – Great way to make word clouds from sites, different social networks, and then change shape to meet your needs (ie, star).
- Tagul – Similar to Tagxedo, a very easy to use site to create different shaped word clouds.
- Worditout – Nice site for making word clouds by just copying and pasting text.
- Word Sift - Excellent site for making word clouds and then editing them. Pictures are also generated to best represent your word cloud.
- VocabGrabber – Wonderful site, similar to Word Sift. Generates color-coded clouds.
- Tag Galaxy - Innovative site that visually represents words in a galaxy style format. A must see!
- Tag Crowd – Simple to use site for creating word clouds by pasting in text or a web page URL.
- Quintura – Visual search engine which returns results in a word-cloud format.
- TwitterSheep – Fun site that generates its results by keywords found in bios from a user’s followers.
WordItOut lets you transform your text into word clouds. You can then save and share them, so everybody can find and enjoy them.
Background
Tag clouds have become more and more common on websites. With these, keywords link to pages on the website and the size of that word represents the number of relevent pages. Many of us have seen these on sidebars across the internet.
Then came Wordle, which offered a unique service on the internet: the ability to create a cloud from your own text. These are known as word clouds, where the size of the word is proportional to the number of times it appears in the original text. The popularity of these word clouds grew, as did the variety of uses.
WordItOut offers an alternative service, with many more settings and options available now and even more planned. It uses a different technology than Wordle, and so can offer several advantages, whilst there are also some limitations. We believe that these two sites should be complimentary to each other.
