Word Clouds with Style

Sometimes it takes me a while to get it.  That’s the case with Tagxedo (or as their site says- “Word clouds with Style”).  While I have posted on this in the past (click here for older post), I had really never explored the site until this week. While I was planning to use Wordle with a class, I had some issues (not with Wordle but with student logins), so at the last minute I switched to Tagxedo.  Like Wordle, you enter the text and repetitive words appear larger in the generated word cloud.  Like Wordle, you can change the orientation, font, and color scheme.  But here’s where you will see the difference- you can shape the cloud into a variety of preselected shapes or upload your own image or word.You can also save the image to your files.  How can you use it? Some students created poems and used that text to create a word cloud. I worked with another class to create animal shapes for a digital story.  This sample was made from my blog and used the hand shape.