Playing with Words

Words, words, words.  Words can be fun, playful, educational, inspiring, life-changing and the key to open knew opportunities.  Letting our students use different sites to create word clouds can be very beneficial.  As educators we must model the use of different sites to help our students credit word clouds.  The following are different sites are tried out and enjoyed exploring.

Wordle
http://www.wordle.net

This is a great site for students to use with their reading assignments.  The site is free,  no account is needed and is very visually appealing.  The choices to create word clouds are many and its ease of use will motivate all students to create their own word clouds.

"Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends."

Tagxedo

http://www.tagxedo.com

Tagxedo is another source for educators and students to explore and use to create word clouds for reflection, discussions, and presentations.  This site is visually busy and but can be easily mastered with practice.  The great thing about Tagxedo is the ability to shape the word clouds into uploaded images or preset images.  The possibilities are endless.

Tagul

http://tagul.com

Tagul is another choice for creating word clouds.  This site requires registration.  You can create a free account to begin to access the features.  Overall it is a good source for students to explore and create their own word clouds.  This site offers tutorials to help the user develop more creative projects.

Quipio

A free app available for download from the App store.

ReciteThis
http://recitethis.com

Quipio and ReciteThis are great sites to use for quotes, thoughts, and ideas.  Quipio is available on the app store as a free download.  The app is user friendly, visually appealing and fun.  ReciteThis is a web page where you can create you own quotes.  Both offer an opportunity to share your creations.  This is a great tool to use for book discussion, favorite quotes and poetry lesson.

Overall all the sites and apps offered great resources for both educators and students.  They are all easy to use and can offer a multitude of creative possibilities.  I really enjoyed Wordle and Tagxedo and I plan to use these sites to help introduce themes for my students.