Word Clouds

Have y'all heard of these?  They are so cool!  I once received one framed as a gift.  It was all about teachers.  So cute!  Anyway, I've known about word clouds for a while, but never considered using them in my classroom.  I've also never played around with it or created a word cloud.  So I started this assignment by googling "free word cloud generators".  One of the first links that popped up was a great blog with the top 5 free word generators.  It explained what each one was and how to use it.  I used the first one in the list called Word it Out. 

 This the world cloud I created:

It was very simple to use and allowed to to change the fonts, colors, and size of text.  I liked that it was easy to manipulate and allowed you to regenerate the image multiple times.

So how would you use this tool in your classroom?

In second grade we spend the first few weeks of school answering these questions "What is an author?", "What is a scientist?", "What is a mathematician?" in order to foster the idea that students will be all of these things during the year and thus how they should act while doing these activities.  So I decided to ask them "What is a scientist?" and I typed what each student said into the generator and then created the image.  The students were amazed with the image.  We talked about why some words were bigger and some were smaller, and how it all worked.

I liked using this tool and I think it worked well to engage my students as well enhance their understanding about what a scientist does.

Here is a link to a great article I found with more great ideas on how to use word clouds in the classroom.

Do you have other ideas on how to use this tool in your classroom?