Lately, chatting with some colleagues I
discovered the word clouds. I’m sure that
most of you have heard about this tool before, or maybe the ones that haven’t have
seen it unconsciously.
What is a word cloud?
The world
cloud is a graphical representation of word frequency. These words are linked
to content sometimes or they are a sample of a bunch of important and meaningful
words. As you may see in the example below there are different sizes among
words. The big ones are the more frequent words and the smaller ones the less
frequent.
How could we use this tool in class?
We can create a word cloud depending on our interests. In this occasion I thought
about an interesting activity we could ask our learners to do: to create a
brief creative and visual summary.
Let’s imagine that they have just finished
reading a book. We could ask them several activities such as writing down the
most important vocabulary words, explaining the plot, describing the main
characters, etc. Nonetheless, our students are tired of this kind of
activities...What if we ask them to do the same activities but we change the
media? Yes!! Of course they can create a word
cloud and develop their creativity!
First of all, we will need to provide them some guidelines and instructions about the activity and the web sources they can use. It’s important that we let them decide which type of words they would highlight depending on the aspect they want to talk about. After that, every student should bring the word cloud in class and would do a speaking activity explaining the word choice and the connection between words.
Do you fancy giving it a try? Just click the
following links:
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