By Marisa Constantinides on February 11, 2010 ( 41 Comments )

Tech Tools & Pedagogy II – Word Clouds

<![CDATA[In this post, I am going to look at Wordle, Wordsift , Word it out and Word Mosaic and try to briefly compare them as I think they all have great potential for a variety of learning activities. This post was inspired by a great discussion in the SEETA course on EasyWeb 2.0 tools run by Nik Peachey and as the course is still available for viewing, I would encourage everyone to visit the related section (as well as the rest of the sections) to find many more great ideas on these tools.

Wordle

This is perhaps the most popular of all these three tools and, I think with good reason. Wordle creates word clouds from any text that you paste into it ommitting structural words and keeping content words. It also chooses size by the frequency of use of a word in a text, so can easily show the main theme of a text.

The word clouds are visually very pleasing and there is a great variety of colour combinations, fonts and cloud shapes that you can choose from. Here is one I made from a poem I found here.

Whether you want to use it prior to reading or as stimulus to speaking or writing activities, Wordle is versatile and visually quite powerful. It’s also possible to include phrases, simply by inserting the symbol ~ between two words (e.g. do~the~shopping will cause these words to appear as a phrase in a Wordle).

Wordsift

Wordsift makes word clouds like wordle, and although these clouds are not as appealing as the ones you can make on Wordle, there is a lot more potential for language activity and for language exploration by the learners working in an independent way.

Words can be sorted by frequency, alphabetically and by field and there are options for identifying which words belong to the General Sevice List or the Academic Word List or to particular fields like science, maths, etc.

Wordsift is also connected to the Visual Thesaurus, and for any of the words in the cloud clicked, the related entry and related pictures and videos appear below the word cloud, allowing for further exploration. Here is the cloud created from the same poem.

Although this word cloud does not look as visually pleasing as the Wordle word cloud, still, if you click the “Create Workspace” link, you can drag and drop any of the words you like from the word cloud above and combine them in whatever way you think is more appropriate. You can even drag and drop any of the pictures which appear for a more powerful visual effect. Here is the “Workspace” I created from the word cloud above.

As you may note, I grouped words in a different way to what they appeared originaly around the main word-concept of the poem.

For both of these tools, Russell Stannard has created a great tutorial video which you can access here. Russell also mentions various great uses for both these tools!

To save images, there is no embed function on either of the two websites, but you can save them by using the screen capture tool and then crop off the image in a picture editor.

Word Mosaic

Word Mosaic is a tool which fills a limited number of shapes with the words you paste. Despite its limitations it may look prettier for certain types of lessons or learners.

You can use it in pretty much the same way you can use Wordle for prediction or text recreation, but this one seems to me also quite suitable for poetry writing prior to reading it or to doing same with song lyrics. Here is one I made with the words of the same poem.

This is more of a shape filler tool and no matter how many or few words you put in, the application will repeat them enough times to fill the shape you have selected, so finding the prime number of words for the image to contain just the words you want it to may take some time.

Word Mosaic allows embedding into your website or blog post.

Word it out

I learnt about Word it out from Richard Byrne’s blog Free Technology for Teachers This produces highly editable word clouds where you can choose the shape of the cloud, the colours of the backrhound and the different fonts but you are also allowed choices of which words to include, remove, make smaller or bigger.

Here is the cloud from the same poem. You can view it only by clicking on this link.

Word cloud made with WordItOut

I must admit I had to try embedding at least four or five times to get it right so this embedding seemed to be quite temperamental! Here is Carol Rainbow’s word cloud – she was much more successful than I was!

Tagul

Tagul behaves like Wordle but puts words in a shape like Word Mosaic and there are many colour and font options available. The nice thing about Tagul is that the world come alive if you hover your mouse over them and you can embed your cloud in your blog or webpage. I first heard about it from Carol Raibow and just discovered that I had started an account even but thought Wordle was nicer so had not used it much. There is a limit of 10 word clouds you can make. Here is an example.

You can click on any of the words in the cloud and this will take you to a related google search.

Word Clouds – Beta

This word cloud tool which I learnt about today (February 28, 2010) from Twitter friend @primarypete, is visually very similar (and equally attractive) to Wordle. Here is a word cloud I made with the words of the same poem as in all the other word clouds in this post.

Plus points

It looks very pleasing on the eye, just like Wordle
It saves as a jpg into your hard drive without having to take a screen capture as you would with wordle
You can randomize it, choose different colour schemes and layouts, change fonts
You can delete common words from the cloud

On the Down Side

It puts all the words in the word cloud
It does not seem to choose key words and their frequency as in wordle
It arranges size by frequency, so small words like articles appear in larger size

But, you can still edit the text you input, take out all the structural words, repeat words you want to highlight and the effect is great!

Tagxedo

Here is a word cloud made with this latest addition to the word cloud tools on the web. The words can go into a shape – there are many ready ones and it is possible to upload your own shape or photo. The developers have some great examples on their samples page but mine, unfortunately does not look as pretty as some on this link

No matter how hard I have tried, the embed code will not show on this page, admittedly because there are many already, but I also tried this in my wiki and it did not work there either. Here is another attempt to fill out a photograph, this time of a friend, with words from his blog. Again, I had to screen capture it and upload it as a jpg. However, the potential is there.

The tool allows you to paste a URL and it collects the words creating a word cloud – I tried a couple below by pasting Nik Peachey’s blog and Shelly Terrell’s blog in their photos – quite a nice effect !

At present the tool is in beta state, so perhaps it will be easier to manage in future. I must say that the additional installation of Silverlight seems to complicate rather than make things simpler but perhaps for more tech-savy teachers this is not a problem.

A Quick Comparison Chart

N.B. The only ones which require registration are Word it Out and Tagul

	Wordle	Word it out	Wordsift	Word Mosaic	Tagul	Word Clouds Beta	Tagxedo
Selection of words to include	Automatic selection of most frequent words; possible to pre-edit text and repeat words; adding ~ between words allows phrases to appear. Right-clicking on word gives you “remove word” option	Word cloud is editableFrom the settings tab you get ‘remove word” option	Yes, through the ‘Workspace’ funtion; click on this and then drag words out of cloud	Yes, by pre-editing test, although words are repeated to fill shapeBy deleting them from original text which is always visible next to cloud	As for WordleBy clicking on cloud, text is made available for editing	By pre-editing textLater when the cloud is ready you can right-click on a word and are given the option of deleting	Tagxedo makes an initial selection of words and you can later edit the cloud from the Words menu by clicking on “keep” you actually “Skip”!!
Highlighting of specific words	Done automatically by frequency of words in text but you can affect this by repeating words you want to make stand out	Yes, allows words to be larger or made smaller	This is done automatically but you can repeat words you want to highlight	Not possible – random words appear larger	Yes, by frequency as in Wordle	This is very random but you may randomize the shape again and again; if lucky, your key concept may appear larger	As for Word Cloud Beta
Shape of word cloud	Various options available	More limited options	Standard linear but workspace allows drag & drop to make new cloud plus pictures from page	Choice of shapes to fill; more options available to registered users	Choice of shapes	Limited options, e.g. all vertical, all horizontal or half and half	Tagxedo has some nice pre-set shapes you can fill with words but it is very difficult to constrain them within the shape boundaries
Colour scheme	Yes, many options available; can customize colours	Yes, many options available	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes a large variety available
Choice of fonts	Yes	Yes fewer	No	Yes a few	Yes	Yes limited	Yes but not standard fonts although you can upload your own
Phrases	Yes by joining words you want to show as a phrase with ~	No	No	No	No	Yes if a hyphen is inserted but hyphen appears in cloud	As for wordle
Saving word cloud	Yes – available from Wordle site. Can be saved by screen capture as an image which can then be edited	Yes can be saved and embedding allowed but will show only if link back to Word it out included with cloud.	No but can be saved by screen capture	Allows embedding in website or blog	Allows embedding	Saves as a jpeg image into your hard drive	Word clouds can be saved as jpeg or ping images but animation is lost. Embedding is quite difficult; to date I have not managed it but will keep trying!

Word clouds can do a lot which a teacher can also do by writing these words on the board – don’t worry if you can’t use them, make your own! The ideas work both ways, with and without technology, but technology does add to the visual impact if you can include it in your lessons.