Word Clouds: WordSift&Wordle

What is word cloud?

• Word cloud is an attractive arrangement of randomly positioned words, where the most important /high frequency words are bigger than the others.

Advantages of word clouds and how can it be used in teaching

• Presents which words used so often in the text.
• Suitable for vocabulary purpose of teaching
• Good for pre-reading activities-gives students main ideas about article
• Can be used for writing activity- asks students to use words in word cloud to write an essay

Two famous tools which generate text into word clouds are WordSift and Wordle. Each of these tools has its own specialities and uniqueness. Let us explore each of these tools and have a try.

Some features:

1. Quickly identify important words that appear in text.
2. Incorporates the amazing visual thesaurus.

Continue reading to find out more about WordSift.

• Click this link to go to Word Sift: 

http://www.wordsift.com/

• Insert selective text into the box and press 'Sift'.

Example of word cloud that is formed using Word Sift:

Thesaurus relationship for the word 'career'

• The meaning of most frequent word (career) is visualized through Thesaurus relationship. 

Some features: 

1.     Show words that appear frequently in the text.

2.     Give users to tweek the cloud with different fonts, layouts and color schemes.

3.     Users can print the word cloud, or save it in wordle gallery.

Continue reading to find out more about Wordle.

• Click this link to go to wordle page :http://www.wordle.net/ . Then click on 'create' tab and this page will appear. 

• To turn the text into word clouds, you can either paste the text or enter the URL.
• Example of word cloud that is formed using Wordle is as below:

Comparisons between WordSift and Wordle