You Are Your Words

I recently discovered this great little web tool from the website iLearnTechnology called You Are Your Words.  It is a word cloud creation site that allows you to use your own image for the shape of the cloud.  It's pretty simple but very effective with out having to create an account.  You Are Your Words was created by the American Heritage Dictionary and is an interesting way to display an important passage of text.  To get started on You Are Your Words you can upload an image or use your webcam to snap a picture.  Once you have your picture uploaded you can then choose to copy and paste text or link to Facebook or Twitter to grab relevant content.  The last step is to fine tune the appearance of your image and then share through Facebook/Twitter or download to use as you wish.

Now What?

You Are Your Words could be used in a lot of ways in the classroom.  In a history classroom you can upload the image of an important person in history and then use a speech they gave or informational paragraph.  You could also use this with characters from a book or your own personal biography.  Lots of great uses and a pretty cool finished product!

Tagul

I was working with Wordle today and in my travels happened upon a site called Tagul.  Tagul is now my new favorite word cloud generator.  Wordle has always disappointed me in the fact that you cannot save your image  without having to use print screen.  Tagul offers the ability to save your image, embed your image or even e-mail it to a friend.  What I liked most about Tagul was the amount of editing options that were offered.  I was able to get very finite with the colors fonts, words, and was even able to have the words fit to an image.
Check out this sweet cloud using the Declaration of Independence with the image of the United States

Now What?

There are so many ways to incorporate word clouds into your classroom.  I like the idea of using them as a review or preassessment to find out how much the class knows about something.  You can also use a list of items (prepositions, famous authors, etc.) and create a poster for your classroom walls.