Cool Tool Review #2

The tool I choose to try was a word cloud. I am fairly new to discovering these, so it took a bit to figure out how to use it and make it my own. I used words from my blog and adjusted the color to my liking.

I received this took from WordItOut, this link. I can use word clouds to provide important words for students so they can learn and remember them better. The more important or more frequent words appear larger, like children, all, sharing, and teachers. This tool allows me to edit the words that I want to use also. I can add or delete words, make more important words larger and less important words smaller. Word clouds can be created to cover any subject or topic or just sum up what my blog consists of. Word clouds can be used to get to know students, The words in the cloud can be words that you use to describe yourself. My point is, there are infinite ways to use word clouds.

I would use this tool in the classroom because it is something that would catch the students' attention. It also promotes critical thinking to view and examine all of the words. The major purpose of word clouds are to improve students' vocabulary as they provide a large scale of words, many that have the same meaning. Students are exposed to similar words rather than the same word over and over again.
Students can use this app to introduce themselves and create a word cloud for the lesson on words they think are important, so they can remember them easier. It would be easy for students to use because they are the ones that get taught the lessons, so students would be more engaged if they had to configure words into a model rather than just read the text. It would be challenging at times because I know when I was a student, if I had to write down significant terms, I would choose the easiest ones rather than trying to find the terms with the most significance relevant to the text. Students try to find the easy way out, so providing a word cloud for them is the best option in this case so they can be aware of the words and find them in the text to match meaning with the words.