The third grade students in Mrs. Guigou’s room at Springfield Park had a great time turning their writing into a word cloud using a program called Tagxedo.  To save time, the students had their writing typed up in Pages and saved in their student folders.  We opened up a web page with Tagxedo and also opened up the Pages document with their writing.  The students then highlighted all of their typing from the Pages document and copied it using “Command/Apple + C.”  On the Tagxedo page, we clicked on load to enter text.  In the text box, the students used “Command/Apple + V” to paste their typing and click submit.  After their word cloud was created, they were able to select their theme, layout, font, orientation, and shape.  Since her student’s had been writing about school, she decided to use the shape of an Apple.  The more text you have, the easier it is to see the shape that is being created.  In their writing, the word school was used the most often, so it was larger than the rest of the words in the word cloud.  This is a great way to have students publish their writing.  I’ve also seen this program used when students are using the thesaurus to find synonyms for over-used words, such as fun and good.  Check it out when you get a chance–  http://www.tagxedo.com/app.html

From Tagxedo