1 – 2 – 3 – Word Cloud!
Word Clouds (wordle to most) can be a dynamic tool for visualizing text and for
presenting a group’s thinking. They are AMAZING!
While planning for the Future of Learning conference at Harvard’s Graduate School of
Education, I wanted to capture and share our participants’ views on “What are the key
features of 21st Century Learning”. At first, word clouds didn’t cross my mind because in
past experiences I had entered a historical speech, lecture notes or asynchronously
generated google docs. All these use cases would be ineffective for our needs. But then
it dawned on me, Socrative could aggregate our real-time responses. Of course!
Here’s the system.
1. Identify a question which will generate responses for your particular needs.*
What 3 words best describe your summer?**
What are you most excited about this school year?**
What are your 3 favorite foods?**
Other Great Questions
What are the key features of 21st century learning? (reflected in the above word
cloud)
Which vocabulary words are giving you difficulty?
List 5 key words from the chapter you just read.
What 3 adjectives best describe this sculpture?
What are synonyms and antonyms of _______?
* have students answer in all lower case so there is consistency in the word cloud.
** Import the quiz that includes these questions using SOC-12260148
2. Initiate a Short Answer or Quiz.
A Short Answer question’s responses will populate your teacher screen.
A Quiz may include many questions and the results will be available to view as a
googledoc or an emailed Excel file.
3. Highlight all the answers and copy them.
Short Answer – highlight and copy the responses on the teacher screen.
Quiz – highlight and copy the column of the question you want to visualize.
4. Paste into a Word Cloud maker
Wordle – The most well-known word cloud tool. It’s easy to use and quickly
adaptable to help you find the colors, fonts, sizes and arrangements to suit your
taste.
Tagxedo – Tagxedo allows users to create clouds in various forms, such as Abe
Lincoln’s head, triangles or the outlines of countries.
Wordsift – You can further highlight words by subjects such as social studies or
science. Developed as an ELL resource at Stanford.
ABCya! - Word clouds for kids!
Word Collage – an App for iPads
Share your ideas!