Word Clouds Across the Curriculum
Word Clouds can be used in any subject for your students to write about what they know about any concept. They can be created before the unit, as a pre-assessment, or at the end of a unit to see what students have learned. You could also create a word cloud as a teacher as a "Guess what we're going to learn" activity. Here are a few other ideas you might like to try:
Beginning of the Year / Community Building
Science
Language Arts
Social Studies
Math
Beginning of the Year / Community Building
- A word cloud note to a friend or family member. (I did this as a Mother's Day gift with my students)
- All About Me - Students create word cloud with words that describe them and their name at the center of the cloud.
- Class expectations and procedures
- Lyrics to a favorite song. You could even do this with a class theme song or motto!
Science
- Write about animals in a biome
- Food Chain word clouds
- Biography of a famous scientist
- Collaborative word cloud for students' hypotheses
Language Arts
- List character traits
- Predict what will happen next
- Classifying parts of speech
- Book reports - copy a passage from a favorite book and have other students guess the book
- Vocabulary words with definitions
- Turn an essay into a word cloud and display both together
- Group words with similar prefixes and suffixes
- Make a word cloud of sight words. (Be sure to turn off the common words filter)
Social Studies
- Compare and contrast historical figures or places in the world
- Make a word cloud of a specific state or country as a component of a report
- Use word clouds to record questions asked during a Mystery Skype
Math
- Word problem = word cloud
- Type characteristics of geometric shapes and make the word cloud into that shape
- Create a word cloud and then have students write the fractions of the words in the cloud
Word Cloud Bookmarks
108 Ways to Use Word Clouds in the Classroom
Helpful Hints
1. Using the tilde character (~) keeps phrases together. Ex. right~attitude~means~success
2. The word filter function will filter out common words like 'and, the, if.'
3. Tagxedo will allow you to change the shape of your word cloud.
4. Your Snipping Tool lets you save and print from any word cloud generator
5. The Lite version of Word Salad will show the Word Salad logo behind every word cloud you create. The paid version removes the logo.
6. You might want to type words into Microsoft Word or a Google Doc first, and then copy and paste into the Word Cloud Generator. This makes editing a breeze!
More hints for Wordle
More hints for Tagxedo
Word Clouds on your iDevice
2. The word filter function will filter out common words like 'and, the, if.'
3. Tagxedo will allow you to change the shape of your word cloud.
4. Your Snipping Tool lets you save and print from any word cloud generator
5. The Lite version of Word Salad will show the Word Salad logo behind every word cloud you create. The paid version removes the logo.
6. You might want to type words into Microsoft Word or a Google Doc first, and then copy and paste into the Word Cloud Generator. This makes editing a breeze!
More hints for Wordle
More hints for Tagxedo
Word Clouds on your iDevice