Being a fan of word clouds, I'm always interested in new ways to use them in the classroom. I recently watched a webinar on SimpleK12 by Kim Munoz, a middle school technology teacher in Texas. Kim shared some great resources on her blog to show teachers how they can use word clouds and where they can go to create them. So why should you have students create word clouds? Word clouds are powerful tools for analyzing and thinking critically about text. They provide students a great visual analysis of passages, speeches, articles, websites and more (hint: the clouds are created based on how frequently words are used).
Steve Johnson's book, Digital Tools for Teaching, provides great examples on how teachers can tie in word clouds across the curriculum. Regardless if you are teaching Language Arts or Math, your students can still analyze messages while turning text into art! Steve provides multiple suggestions for each content area...Math teachers have your students create a word cloud out of word problems so they can look for clues to solve the problems...
Language Arts and Social Studies teachers have your student compare and contrast speeches of historical figures or different genres...
Science teachers have your students log which foods they eat for a week and see what they are eating most often...
There are many other great resources for integrating word clouds into the curriculum. For more resources check out these LiveBinders and our previous blog posts:
2 comments:
I use individual and whole class word clouds as a pre and post test of content vocabulary for my elementary school students. Everyone loves to see the changes!
That's a great idea Janis! Thank you for sharing!
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