Word Cloud

What is Word Cloud?

As you can see above, it's an image composed of words used in a particular text or subject, in which the size of each word indicates its frequency or importance. Most word cloud programs work in the same, straight-forward way; the more a word is used in the text, the bigger it is shown in the cloud.

How to make a word cloud?

1. You have to have some texts to copy and paste in on a word cloud tool.
2. Click the button.
3. There you are.

It will show you a group of words like the image above. Words are in different sizes and colours and you can change the colours, the layout, the fonts...and so on. Some allows you to remove words you don't want to show; some allows you to mark specific word from other word lists, i.e., Academic Word List...etc. Next, I am going to introduce some word cloud tools.

Word cloud tools and its pros and cons

There are lots and lots of word cloud tools you can find on the Internet. I'll just to name some that I have tried for you. Simply they can all create a word cloud(of course!) but with little differences. It makes them to kind of have different purposes and functions. Now, let's take a look at these fun and useful tools.

• Wordsift

This is a tutorial video made by a teacher for her third graders. It's simple and suitable for teacher in Taiwan if you would like to introduce it to your students.

• The very first image in the beginning was made from Wordsift.
  When you hovering on a word, it will become bigger, like highlighting.

• When you click a word, it shows you different meanings in a word net. See picture.
  
• When you hovering on a dot, it gives you more explanation and definition of that usage. If you click a word, it will lead you to another word net.
• Another great function is that when you click a word, you can also search for the images from here. See picture.
  
  ⭑ It helps students get the idea of what the word is.
• What's more, you can see the word in the text. 
  
  ⭑ Students or users can see the word in the text. It provides students or users to learn collocations.
  ⭑ Teacher can copy several sentences here, and take out of the target words and let learners think and discuss what the missing word is.
• Lastly, you can switch 'Cloud View/Text View'. In Text View, you'll be able to see 'Statistics and Readability'. It shows the average grade level. However, I'm not sure how this is calculated. It may be based on some database. It could be referred to.
  
  
• ABCYa! Word Clouds
  
  ⭑ Very easy and quick to use.
  ⭑ User-friendly
  ⭑ Simple template
  ⭑ Savable ▴ Template and all the designs are set. You can just choose from what it provides.

• Wordle
  
  I just type in these words once like vocabulary list so it turns out the same size of the words. Wordle is just like others so I want to show one different feature here.
  
  When you double click the word cloud, it turns into hallow words.
  
  For very young learners, this can be a good tool for them to trace target words or to decorate target words.
  
  ▴ Wordle is currently not available for user to download it as PNG. What we can do now is to screen capture it.
• The above three tools need JavaScript installed. Then, they can work well on Safari, Firefox, and Chrome.
• Next one is a web tool. We can use it directly when we get to the website.

• Online word cloud generator
  
  ⭑ It can be saved as JPG
  ⭑ It has various of shapes to choose from, and you can even upload your own shape!
  ⭑ You can choose the file size of your word cloud, for example, a size suitable to post on Facebook.
  ⭑ You can manually delete the words.
  ▴ You may have to check capital letters and lower case letter as it seems to count them as different words.
• The next two are not working on my MacBook.
  Tagxedo needs Silverlight but I still can't use it after I installed Silverlight.
• Tagxedo
  
  
  Since it doesn't work on my MacBook, let's watch the tutorial video.
  ⭑ The functions of Tagxedo that can be played around are like all the mixture of above, except for Wordsift.
• Office with Pro Word Cloud (Add-in for Word and Powerpoint)
  ⟶click to see how to find the add-in.
• Create A Word Cloud in Microsoft Word
  ⟶Click to see tutorial video.
  This Microsoft Word and Powerpoint Add-in tool is currently not available for Mac.
  ⭑ It will be really convenient if you can just simply create word cloud with Word and Powerpoint. It makes user easier to print out or present it to students or others.

Using word cloud?

1. subliminal reinforcement
   - be the cover of a theme
   - quickly brings audience to the topic
   - give briefly ideas to a theme
   - Visual representation of data tends to have an impact and generates interest amongst the audience.
2. association
   - lead to a discussion
   - find out the theme
   - become more curious or prepared what's on next
3. prediction of a story
4. text analysis
5. creativity
   - students create their word cloud
   - design for their presentation maybe

Advice

• Word clouds are an easy to use and inexpensive option for visualizing text data. One of the challenges of interpreting word clouds is that the display emphasizes frequency of words, not necessarily their importance.

• Word clouds will not accurately reflect the content of text if slightly different words are used for the same idea (for example, ‘large’, ‘huge’, ‘giant’, ‘enormous’, and ‘big’).

Overall, I hope to offer a brainstorming opportunity!
After all, I believe learning by doing.
So, if you have any experiences of using in the classroom, please share with me or leave a comment. Thank you!