MEETING THE WORD CLOUDS

Hi everyone,

Today's entry is about Word Clouds. Word Clouds or also known as Tag Clouds is a visual presentation of words which typically used to point out the keywords of a text or to visualise a free form of a text. The frequency or importance of words is shown through font size or colour. Here, I am going to introduce two type of Word clouds that I learnt during my ICT lesson. 

The first one is :

Wordle 

Second is :  

Wordsift

Both types of Word clouds are easy to use. Just click the link above each pictures to direct to the respective webpage. Then, copy and paste text data which you want to revert to word clouds image and Click 'Go' for Wordle and 'Sift' for Word Sift to get the clouds. 

Comparison of both Wordle and Wordsift

Wordle

• It is colourful 
• Faster than Wordsift (Based on my experience, may vary with others)
• The font, layout design colour and language could be edited
•  It is printable
• Focuses solely on words visualization, there is no involvement of images
• Could be saved and embedded 

Wordsift

•  The visual design is quite dull and it is not editable
•  It is slower than Wordle - could be a demotivating factor
• It is limited in terms of transferring the information - limits the amount of text data used 
• Can drag images with words – could utilize to do mind map (picks up images)
• Can sort words, for example:  rare to common words vice versa, and alphabetically from A-Z or Z-A

How can we use this tools in ELT classroom:

1. Use as a pre reading activity to teach vocabulary. The word cloud is used to introduce new vocabulary to students, and also could classify the vocabularies into most common and rare. Let the learners guess or predict the theme of the article
2. Writing activity - summary writing using the words in the word clouds or narrative essay using the words lited in the word cloud. 
3. Could act as a memorisation tool for learners because the word clouds represent the keyword which explains the main idea of a long text like history texts. Key points would help the learners to memories the idea of the article better and easier. 

MJ