Tagxedo for my poem, The Hike
Chances are you’ve already discovered these two amazing tools: Tagxedo and Wordle.
Both allow you to create word clouds with whatever text you choose, and both are free and relatively easy.
I made the top cloud using Tagxedo and the words of my poem, “The Hike.” I used Wordle and the same poem for the bottom cloud.
Wordle for my poem, The Hike
Very similar, huh? I didn’t try to create the same visual; I just played around with what I liked, what felt right for the poem.
Like a tag cloud on a website that allows you to see a visual representation of the posts it contains, a word cloud represents visually the words that make up a piece of written material.
Repeated words are usually “weighted” by an increased font size, while common words, like articles and prepositions, are often omitted.
Which to Use?
Both websites give you a lot of options in creating your word cloud. You can copy and paste text (like a short story or an essay or article), and then play around with the options. You can choose the layout, colors, and font.
Wordle is definitely the simplest of the two, which goes along with fewer options to choose from. One serious drawback in my opinion, though, is that there is no way to download your cloud from the website. You have to take a screenshot of the page and paste it into an image-editing program like Photoshop.
Tagxedo is more flexible but also more difficult to use. It has a lot of features that Wordle doesn’t, like the ability to upload your own pictures and a selection of clip art that you can use to create the shape of your cloud. And with Tagxedo, you can download JPGs of your work in a variety of sizes.
For this cloud, I uploaded a B&W image of an eagle and used my school’s alma mater. (We’re the George Washington High School Eagles. ;))
GWHS Eagles Alma Mater
I don’t think it really looks like an eagle, though. Maybe an eagle head would be better. I’d like to add the shadow of the image I uploaded behind the cloud, but I couldn’t figure out how to do that in the time I spent working with it.
Classroom Uses
If you’re wondering how in the world you’d use this in the classroom, check out this slideshow:
Tech Issues
And what do you do if you just don’t have access to enough computers for all of your students to use these tools? Well, there’s always the low-tech option: paper and markers. :P
Last spring, I had my freshmen make vocabulary posters for two of the novels we read. We used bulletin-board paper. I thought they turned out marvelously:
What About You?
Have you used words to make visuals in your classroom? Do you have any other suggestions or ideas?
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Most of my teaching resources are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License, which means you can feel free to use them with attribution as long as you don’t use them commercially. If you’re not sure, don’t hesitate to ask me. Unfortunately, I am currently unable to send out my tests and quizzes, but I am hoping to establish a less time-consuming alternative for this in the near future. Sorry!!
