Prediction - You can create word clouds of texts before the students read or listen and ask them to make predictions about the content of the text based on the word cloud.You could also see if they could rewrite or reconstruct the text based on the word cloud. You can build up a bank of word clouds over a semester and pull them out at random to get students to recall the texts they have studied and the key vocabulary in them. Show them the word cloud and see if they can remember what the text was about and how the words were used within the text. Revision of texts - You can paste in short texts that your students have studied recently.This is a wonderful flexible tool to use with students. You can download a higher quality Quicktime version here (Right click and the 'Save as').To see how this is done watch the tutorial movie below. The word clouds are really easy to create and can be printed up for classroom use or saved to a gallery on line. Here's what a word cloud based on the URL of this blog looks like. The site then generates a word cloud based on the frequency of key words in the text or webpage. The word clouds are created by entering either a text, URL or user name into a field.
I've just discovered Wordle, which is a really useful site for creating word clouds.
