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.

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