Wordle and Tagxedo By: Jen, Shayla and Christine

Wordle: Wordle is a tool for creating a text cloud that uses the size of the text to represent the frequency of each word in the source sample. It’s completely free and unrestricted. You can use the wordles you create or find the in the public gallery for anything, even commercially.

Tutorial:

Pros and Cons Pros: Free Easy to use Cons: Limitations with saving, editing and sharing Overuse may bore your students

Ways to use in classroom: 1. Before you pass out dictionaries to your students, give your students a new vocabulary word and ask them to brainstorm all the words they associate with it. Gather up all the words brainstormed and put them into Wordle. 2. Use them in classroom polls for favorite colors, birthday months, favorite animal, hardest spelling word and feelings. The largest word would be the winner of the poll. 3. Wordle Walls: have students brainstorm definitions, adjectives and synonyms for the word. Hang on the all for students reference.

Examples:

Tagxedo: Tagxedo is a cool tool that allows the user to turn words into clouds. It graphically emphasizes the most frequently used words. It is similar to wordle, but unlike Wordle Tagxedo allows you to shape-fill (create word clouds into given shapes).

Tutorial: :

Pros and Cons Cons Difficulty with copy and pasting text into program Older computer versions may have issues using program Pros Free Extremely easy to use Images created with Tagxedo are licensed under Creative Commons and are free for personal use

Ways to use in classroom: 1. All about me pictures, you as a teacher would type your students names (largest font) and then have them type in a word describing them. This is a great way to get to know your students and for them to learn about each other. 2. You an have hem create title pages. Put all the words they thought dealt with a certain content are and put them around the classroom. 3. Students can make visual representations of poetry. They would type their poem and then you can add them into a poetry book.

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