Let's welcome Wordle (www.wordle.net) and Tagxedo (www.tagxedo.com). These two webpages help us to create word clouds. Maybe if you read the term you may think you don't know what it is, but if I show you some examples, you might change your opinion:
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They're great, aren't they? If I were to present this tool to my students, I would do it at the end of the year and I would ask them to create a word cloud so as to express what they learnt all troughout the year and how they felt in the English lessons. First, they would have to write a short text with their opinions, feelings, ideas, etc. and then they would have to use Wordle or Tagxedo in order to make a word cloud. I would employ it in that way, what about you?
Hi Agus!! I love the models, I'll try this new forms of word clouds!! I think that this tool is great to use it as you mentioned, when we want students to interact with others by discussing as regards certain topic or expressing their thoughts. In my case, I resorted to wordle to work in Didactics. I used a word cloud as a brainstorming of ideas. In that way they would be able to share and reflect upon concepts we went through the previous lesson. Students had to work in groups of 3 or 4. Each of them, had to pick a Word from the word cloud and try to explain to their classmates what they remembered. At the same time, I kept a record of the words on the blackboard and at the end we had to make connections among the different words, since all of them belonged to different approaches but they were related. It really worked! What I liked most was that it gave students some freedom to choose a word about which they wanted to discuss and at the same time was a sort of game.
ResponderEliminarSee you soon,
Iva.
Hi, Iva! Thanks for your comment! I loved the way you employed word clouds with your students, very very interesting, especially so as to work with speaking skills. It would be also useful to use word clouds when working with vocabulary, you can give some of them to students and they can guess the word that it is described.
EliminarSee you ina couple of hours!
I love the pictures, Agus, great examples! Word clouds are great, either as closures, as you suggested, or as a kind of warm-up, for brainstorming, as Iva worked with them. You can also use them as stimulus for visual learners or in guessing games, like we did last Monday.
ResponderEliminarBy the way, try with http://www.imagechef.com/ic/es/word_mosaic/, it’s very user friendly and you can create your own shapes for your word mosaics :)
Hi, Sol! Thank you for the suggestion. I think that word clouds would be very useful in guessing ganes as students wiould feel motivated and they would be playing= excellent option, hahaha.
EliminarSee you!