Useful Word Cloud Tools

What is this?

This is a useful website for creating word clouds. The word cloud can be created by entering whole sentences, whole documents, web addresses or tables. According to the frequency of key words in the text, the site will generates a word cloud. The most frequent or important words are bigger than the others. Click 'creat'

and then enter the text,

a word cloud can be created automatically in such an easy way.

Why is the content good for language learning? 

• It's easy to operate, only 2 steps: enter text and work it out! Both teacher and students can understand and apply it into real class easily.
• Free to use and no sign up required.
• No text length limited, text can be from coursebook, website, oral materials, even exam papers.
• The word clouds can be designed randomly according to personal preference, which increase students' interest and practicial ability.
• It's flexible for teacher to change the original text(add or delete some sentences or words) to a text that much more suitable for students' language proficiency.
• To present words by a visual picture is much more attractive and can stimulate students' visual capacity.

How might you use it in a language teaching context?

• Teacher can creat a word cloud of a text and show it to students, then asks them to predict or guess the content or meaning of the text based on the word cloud. If they come across any new words in the word cloud, they can work in pair to check them , or teacher can explain the new words.
• Another way is opposite to the first one. After completing a unit, teacher creates word clouds based on some texts that they learned, and asks students to retell the texts.
• Teacher creats a word cloud of a text and teaches students some important and frequent vocabularies in details.
•  Teahcer asks students to creat a word cloud about themselves or anyone they are interested in. Then share the word clouds with their peers and see if they can identify the person in each other's cloud.

Limitation

• There isn't any word cloud games or quizes online.
• Not many examples or topics are available.
• Can't see others' word coulds on homepage.
• Simple website design and too many Google ads.

Other useful word cloud tools:

 Tagxedo http://www.tagxedo.com/

 Wordle  http://www.wordle.net/

 Wordsift http://www.wordsift.com/


Russell's training videos
http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/wordCloud/index.html
http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/wordSift/index.html
http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/wordle/index.html