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Word Clouds

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Start with Tom Barretts Forty-Four Interesting Ways* to use Wordle in the Classroom. Check out Shelly Terrells 12 Word Cloud Resources, Tips, & Tools. Marisa Constantinides has another great post with word cloud examples. Phil Bradley also has a nice post comparing word cloud apps. Michael Gorman has a great post with a lengthy title: I Can Back Off My Blogging, Turn Down My Tweeting, And Even Wrap Up My Wiki, But I Cant Wane My Wordling. At the bottom of that post you can also nd links to several other Wordle-related posts he has written. Michael Gorman has a great post with a lengthy title: I Can Back Off My Blogging, Turn Down My Tweeting, And Even Wrap Up My Wiki, But I Cant Wane My Wordling. At the bottom of that post you can also nd links to several other Wordle-related posts he has written. Learning With Computers, the excellent online global community of ESL/EFL teachers exploring how to effectively use technology with students, has this months activity focused on using word clouds with students. Check-out the wiki lled with examples, and contribute your own.

Tagxedo is a new and neat word cloud generator. The creator of Wordle calls it not so much an alternative to Wordle as much as Wordle the next generation. Russell Stannard from Teacher Training Videos has just made a how to video on creating and using different Word Cloud generators. He also has written a good post titled What Is A Word Cloud? War Words is an interesting interactive from The Wall Street Journal. It shows word clouds to illustrate how U.S. Presidents have spoken about the Iraq War since 2003. Im including it in this post as an example of how they can be used. The Answer Garden is an intriguing combination of a survey tool and a word cloud generator. Without requiring any registration, it lets you pose a question to which people can write their own short answers. The answers appear as a word cloud below the question, with the words changing in size based on how often they are used in responses. Responders have the option of writing in their own answer or clicking on one of the words already in the word cloud. The entire garden can be embedded in a blog or website, and you can also link to it. The fact that anybody can answer anything to the question without identifying themselves makes it problematic to say the least in many school settings. But in certain mature situations, it could be very useful. Free Tools Challenge #10: Word clouds with Wordle comes from Edublogs. Type in a user name into Tweet Topic Explorer and youll get a multi-colored word cloud in bubbles. Using Wordles To Teach Foreign Language Writing is a useful study. Summer PD: New Teacher Boot Camp Week 1 Using Wordle comes from Edutopia. Word clouds considered harmful is an interesting post from the Nieman Journalism Lab. HTML5 Word Cloud: Text Analyzer is from Devalyne Britt via Laura Gibbs. Jason Davies has developed a new interactive world cloud generator that lets you use Twitter, Wikipedia or a URL address.

The Assignment
1. Using Wordle (http://www.wordle.net/) create an image that describes you! Minimum of 25 words, but the more words the better, the more words you use, the more interesting your design will be. Be warned, Wordle does not seem to work with Internet Explorer, try Safari, Firefox or Chrome. You might have to install the JAVA plug-in and restart your browser. 2. iPad Users: Apps for making word clouds on your Ipad are listed at the bottom of this document with links to the app store. Look at all before deciding which ones to use. 3. Take a screen capture (picture) of your design, this will give you an image that can be added to your website. Instructions for how make a screen capture at on the Help Logo of Week 2. 4. Now make a SECOND Fun with Text project, using Tagexdo, OR Tagul or one of the tools mentioned in the article 12 Cool Word Cloud Generators or in the resources above or from the options listed on the Fun with Text page from the of the Technology Keys Wiki. Or on the iPad an different app. 5. The topic for this second image you are making should be about teaching OR education OR school OR technology OR teachers OR your content area, OR....???? Something or anything related to education. 6. Take a screen capture of your second design, this will give you another image that will be added to the SAME post/place on your website. 7. Write a reection to go with the 2 images. How you think you could use these types of tools in your classroom, make sure your reection has at least one specic curriculum idea and show both the images your made along with the reection. Both images and the reection are one entry on your website. Title: Fun with Text-Word Clouds

A few iPad App possibilities (there may be others, do some hunting and share in your reection what you nd.

WordFoto $1.99 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wordfoto/id414002091?mt=8 WordFoto - Pictures Worth a Thousand Words You've probably heard the tired cliche about a picture being worth a thousand words. We've taken this phrase quite literally and created WordFoto, an app that turns photos and words into amazing typographic works of art.

Wordsalad Free https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wordsalad-your-salads-redened/ id545164778?mt=8 Make great wordsalads out of documents that matter (or not) to you! With WordSalad you can make beautiful word clouds, super customized with different fonts, colors and words layouts.

CloudArt .99 https://itunes.apple.com/app/id598345649 Unleash your creativity by making beautiful word clouds on your iPad. Simply give Cloudart some text from a web page or paste some into the app and it will automatically create a gorgeous word cloud for you in seconds. Next, get busy with the intuitive sliders to customise your cloud to your heart's content. When you're happy with your masterpiece, share it with friends!

Visual Poetry $1.99 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/visual-poetry-word-collage/id364299857?mt=8 Type your text or phrase and watch it instantly arranged as a mosaic in a variety of shapes and styles. 24 symbols are included or you can draw you own shapes. Pinch and drag to resize and rotate individual words. See examples and demo videos at: imagechef.com/poetry

TagCloud .99 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tagcloud/id540921415?ls=1&mt=8 Make beautiful tag clouds from your iPhone and iPad! Create a word cloud from a web page, custom text, your own spreadsheet le, or try sample clouds included with the app. The app comes with more than 25 different styles of clouds, from plain black and white style to fun and colorful. Share your cloud with the world by exporting the cloud high-res image to your photo library, email or tweet.iCloud-enabled universal app (iPhone & iPad). Your saved tag clouds will be available to all your iOS devices.

Word Collage .99 Create stunning word collages on your iPhone and iPad! Set up a collage with your text(or website URL), different layouts, fonts, and color themes. Simply start by clicking on the "Text" button. Add some text or input a website url. Select color theme and font in Settings. Select Landscape or Portrait orientation. Word Collage even lets you pan and zoom the picture.

Phoetic - The amazing photo word cloud generator 99 Create beautiful phoems with your own photos and text! A phoem is an image consisting of text only. Choose your own words, select your favorite photo, pick a font and color palette and turn them in a work of art to impress friends and family. The result can be stored as a PNG, JPEG image or even a PDF document to allow for printing at extremely high resolutions.

TypeDrawing $2.99 TypeDrawing is the best typographic drawing app, and V3.0 makes a giant leap forward. TypeDrawing is super easy and perfect for creating typography art and even unique watermarks on your photos. Type a sentence, then just draw with your nger. Voila! You've now got a one of a kind, totally unique and amazing typographic work of art. If you love typography, or even if you don't know what that means, you can easily create poetic visual art with this fun and easy-to-use app.