When wordle was a world cloud

So what can you do with a word cloud?  Marilyn Pryle recently updated her post on MiddleWeb with several ideas for using word clouds in your classroom. I tend to use her first suggestion when I have text to analyze.

Word clouds for all

Monica Burns (writing in edutopia) suggests several uses of word clouds in the classroom in her post here.  While I often use word clouds to help sort data, she had several interesting suggestions.  She mentions Mentimeter in her post, but there are several other free sites you can use including WordArt, and  Word Clouds (in abcya).

Teaching with Word Clouds

While I often use word clouds as illustrations, this blog post from Marilyn Pryle will provide several teaching suggestions.  Word clouds are easy to make and provide question opportunities for your students. This one (made from my blog url is from Word Art (formerly known as Tagul).

Tagul (chrome word clouds)

While I have been a big Wordle and Tagxedo fan, neither of those tools works on a chromebook.  Recently I was reminded of Tagul (see the post here from MIchelle Bond).  It works on chrome, allows you to sign in with Google, and has many of the same features as Tagxedo.  Here’s a sample I created- see if you can guess the topic.

Can you guess the wordle?

One of the many fabulous resources hosted by Jen Wagner is her Guess the Wordle site.  You can select your level (based on grade level) or select one of the other options.  This could be a great opening activity projected for the class.  Students can defend their decisions or even make their own Wordle. (Just remember, Chromebooks are not wordle friendly).