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Have you ever tried Word Salad? No, I don’t mean a salad made with words. I mean the iPad app, Word Salad, used for making Word Clouds?
Word Clouds are more than just pretty cloudy words on a screen. When learners create Word Clouds, they are actually looking at data. The data are words.
Word Clouds can assist in brainstorming, enhancing critical thinking, clarifying concepts, or helping students actually see overused words in their own writing.
You can make Word Clouds on your iPad using the app Word Salad Lite (free). There are other iPad apps available for making Word Clouds, but Word Salad Lite does the job and (unlike the others) is free.
You can also make a Word Cloud on a computer. There are many websites available to help your students make Word Clouds. Two of the more well-known websites for Word Clouds are the following:
And recently I have stumbled on
- Jason Davies Word Cloud which seems to offer some interesting options.
How could you use this? Have your students put all of their poems into a one Word Cloud to see what ideas, themes or words appear frequently. Have your students put their reflections into a Word Cloud. Determine if their reflections are positive or negative based upon the Words that show up. Make one Word Cloud about needs and another about wants and compare. What ideas do you have?
Further resources about Word Clouds
- Word Clouds – Educational Tools (see page 3 for list of activities)
- Cybraryman Word Cloud Resources (yes, the page looks horrible, but he has a rich collection of resources)
- Many Eyes This site created by IBM helps with many different types of data visualization beyond Word Clouds. It is suitable for serious scientific work.
Pro Tip: Collect the text for a Word Cloud in another document – like a google doc – before copying and pasting it into the Word Cloud generator. If you make a mistake or want to try a different setting, you can easily find your text again without recreating it.
