Tag Cloud

Word Clouds are alternative ways to look at data. They are highly visual and can be beautiful, informative images that can communicate much information in a single glance. The clouds give greater prominence in terms of relative size to words that appear more frequently in the source text.

Implementation

1. Word clouds are easy to read, analyze and compare and can be used creatively to:

• Summarize speeches and written works
• For visual analysis of qualitative data
• Let organizations see how they are perceived by the world (brand clouds)
• Conduct data mining from a body of a text or for visual poetry
• Help writers and students reflect on their work.

2. A shortcoming of Tag Clouds is that they are often built around natural language which can be ambiguous.

• When we construct tables, cahrts or graphs we label data with tags that apply our personal understanding. Word Cloud keywords may not be specific enough to generate any new meaning or understanding.

Classroom Management

Ten Ideas for Tag Clouds in the classroom:

1. Prepare “about me” presentations by using word clouds.
2. Use as a pre-reading activities by asking “what is this ‘text /song/ article/ picture’ about.”
3. Use to monitor the frequency of word usage in student writings.
4. Create discussion topics in word clouds, and determine and highlight the target words that should be used during the discussion .
5. Write a story or essay using the words in the tag clouds.
6. Use word clouds during post reading by asking the students to guess the main and the supporting ideas in the text.
7. Compare two different themes in class. (in terms of genre, topic, main idea, plot, characters, etc…)
8. Prepare posters related to special days or events.
9. Use word clouds to teach pronunciation and word emphasis.
10. Play games with word clouds. (e.g: ask your students to find the synonyms or antonyms of certain words).

From: Sultan Zeydan's Blog http://sultanzeydan.edublogs.org/2011/06/01/10-ways-to-use-word-clouds-in-our-classes/