have you ever heard of word cloud? A word cloud is the graphical representation of word frequency, which is used to depict the keyword of the text. It is a way of analysing and visualising the text in more attractive and easy way. Both teachers and students can use word cloud for effective teaching and learning process in the classroom.
How we can use word clouds in the classroom?
- Teacher might use this to teach new vocabulary to students during the pre-activity in order to activate the schemata of students. Students may acquire the knowledge better and more effective they have basic knowledge of the language that will find in the next stage of learning.
- Perhaps teacher can use word clouds to teach grammar in the classroom. This might be one of interesting and attractive ways to introduce students new language forms.
- Another activity that teachers can apply is guessing the story. Teachers provide the word clouds to students. Students then have to guess and predict the story. Later, they will share and compare their stories with the partners, and give comments and opinions on each others' stories. This eventually promotes peer feedbacks in the classroom. Then, teacher will give feedbacks on their predicted stories.
- Word cloud is very useful for students too. They can use this to visualise their own study notes. By using this, they can create word clouds which contain the key words of their study notes, whether for English, Science or any other subjects. This may help students in their learning process through the simplifying of their study notes.
This time I want to introduce 2 new tools which can be used to form word clouds, Wordsift and Wordle. It is easy and free to create your own word clouds!
WORDSIFT
What are the features of Wordsift?
- To use Wordsift, firstly you have type your words or text, or just copy and paste the text in the box provided. Then, click 'sift' to visualise the text into word clouds. Easy!
- It provides the workspace, where we can drag the pictures related to the word clouds to the space.Thus, this may help students to learn better and effective through the help of graphic illustrations.
- It can provide example of sentences (if we click on the words). Students will learn how to compose correct sentences using the words from the word clouds.
- The words can be arranged alphabetically.
- We can find the words thesaurus using the Visual Thesaurus provided. Hence, at the same time, students can learn and add more vocabularies by discovering the thesaurus of words in the word clouds.
Tutorial video on how to use Wordsift
The main problem of Wordsift is it does not provide the printable version of the word clouds. We have to print the word clouds directly from the web page. However, teacher may use this as authentic materials to students in the classroom.
WORDLE
Tutorial video on how to use Wordle
What are the features of Wordle?
- Plus point for Wordle: We can change the design, the colour of layout and can choose type of font that we want! You can choose to use upper case or lower case letters too if you want.Word cloud generated from Wordle is very colourful. This may motivate and add interest to students to learn as it is appears very attractive and beautiful.
- Besides, just like Wordsift, you just have to type in or copy and paste the words or text that you want to visualise in the box provided. In addition, you just can import the text you want to visualise from another blogs or websites by copying and pasting the URL of the text in the space provided. Simple!
- Wordle does allow us to decide how many word we want in our word clouds. We can select options if we want to leave numbers, even you can choose to leave out common words for instance common words from Hebrew, Finnish, Spanish and many more.
- Next, we can save our word clouds in the public gallery, which can be found in the internet afterwards. It does provide printable version of the word clouds which Wordsift does not provide for us.
I am just highlighting the features of these two word clouds generator. In my opinion, both of them are very essential to be used in the classroom, not only for English classroom but for any subject learning too. The two are functioning very well to generate the word clouds, Wordsift may not have features provided in Wordle and vice versa. That is why I cannot decide which one is better to generate the word clouds. I might be using both of them for my teaching in the future and also for my study notes.
* Here are few more word clouds that you can use in your class or for yourself. Try them!
Tagxedo
ABCya
Tagul
TagCrowd
WordItOut
ImageChef-WordMosaic
Create your own word clouds today!
Bye!
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