Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Word Clouds on the iPad?

I've always enjoyed doing word clouds with my students.  
A few of my favorite uses were to hang a name cloud outside my door at the beginning of the year with all of our students' names or have my students create a word cloud about their experience at Outdoor School, in the shape of their mascot!
There are many great sites online to make word clouds, but most require flash, java, or other add-ons that make those sites incompatible with the iPads and iPods. 

Here are some app options to explore:

WordSalad (Free Version with option to pay $0.99 to get rid of ads and watermark)

Core Features:
-Import any text from iOS clipboard with a single tap  (create your own by making a list in your Notes app or any other word doc app that allows for copy/paste) 
-Customize with 8  fonts-Color with 8 color palettes -Feeling creative? WordSalad gives you 5 layouts to position your words-Save your salads to camera roll for later reuse and export them to pdf


Cloudart ($0.99) iPad Only 
Core Features: 
-no ads or watermarks
-23 fonts, 7 layout styles, and 19 color palettes
-Share by email, pdf, save in app, or save to camera roll
-tap on the word cloud to add more words
-create straight from a webpage by pasting in the address



Need ideas for word clouds in the classroom? 
  • Take a news article, blog post, famous song, or short story and create an easy visual of key themes or points being made.  
  • Cut and paste reflections to a piece of work from all students and see what the common words were
  • Collecting Data  (input a list of what students ate for a week and see what they ate the most!)
  • Beginning of the Year Ice Breaker "About Me" Activity 
  • End of the Year "Highlights" Activity 
  • and ....

For more word cloud resources, check out these sites:

WordSift - Play with Words! from Digital Drifting 

3 comments:

  1. thank you so much! I have been trawling for ages trying to find a sassy ipad word cloud app and thanks to you I've now downloaded Cloudart and have created 3 word clouds in 10 minutes!

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  2. You could also have a look at Phoetic. This app allows you to create beautiful, detailed photo word clouds. You can choose any image to create your own template, select one of the cool embedded fonts, choose background and foreground colors. You can even store the result as a .pdf file to print at extremely high resolutions. DISCLAIMER: I am the developer of Phoetic :-) Cheers!

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for the suggestion. I'm exploring it right now and it looks great!

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