A text cloud or word cloud is a visualization of word frequency in a given text as a weighted list, according to Wikipedia. This concept is often used in education for visualization, brain storming, and mind mapping. While this can be done using paid applications such as Inspiration, there are a number of free sites that accomplish the same.
- Wordle - Probably the oldest and most popular of the word cloud creators. Word clouds can then be edited w/ different fonts, colors, and layouts, and even shared w/ others online.
- Tagxedo - Great way to make word clouds from sites, different social networks, and then change shape to meet your needs (ie, star).
- Tagul - Similar to Tagxedo, a very easy to use site to create different shaped word clouds.
- Worditout - Nice site for making word clouds by just copying and pasting text.
- Word Sift - Excellent site for making word clouds and then editing them. Pictures are also generated to best represent your word cloud.
- VocabGrabber - Wonderful site, similar to Word Sift. Generates color-coded clouds.
- Tag Galaxy - Innovative site that visually represents words in a galaxy style format. A must see!
- Tag Crowd - Simple to use site for creating word clouds by pasting in text or a web page URL.
- Quintura - Visual search engine which returns results in a word-cloud format.
- TwitterSheep - Fun site that generates its results by keywords found in bios from a user's followers.
David Kapuler is an educational consultant with more than 10 years of experience working in the K-12 environment. For more information about his work, contact him at dkapuler@gmail.com and read his blog at cyber-kap.blogspot.com
