TEACHING VOCABULARY THROUGH WORD CLOUD TOOLS!

Hi everyone !
This week I want to share with you something very interesting that I found related to vocabulary teaching. It has to do with strategies like Wordle or WordSift.
WORDLE is a strategy that focuses on explicit teaching of vocabulary and helping students become independent word learners.
Developing breadth and depth of vocabulary depends on building connections between words and developing elaborate webs of meaning.
WORDLE is a free Web application that allows you to create a word cloud based on the frequency of words in a particular text. It can be used to stimulate students' thinking about the meaning, importance, and relationship of words as they analyze, create, and publish Wordles. To create a word cloud, you paste text into the applet and then manipulate the visual display by selecting the color scheme, layout, and font. Word clouds can be used to highlight keywords and themes to prepare students for reading, as well as prompt discussion after reading.
WORDSIFT is another free word cloud tool available on the Internet. Like Wordle, a word cloud is created based on text that is cut and pasted into the application. Although WordSift does not support artistic design of the display, it offers important learning supports. Each word can be clicked on to show a collection of related images, a word map, and a listing of sentences from the text that present the word in different contexts. WordSift also sorts words by difficulty and identifies academic words.
EXAMPLE OF WordSift
I created the word cloud based on the  speech of Martin Luther King “I had a dream” , which is shown in the figure below :

Questions about this WordSift might include :

1- What does the word cloud suggest this speech is about ?

2- What seem to be the most important words?

3- How do these words go together? 

4- Why do you think the WordSift designer chose this shape of word cloud? 

Students will most likely conjecture that the speech is about freedom. Some students may notice the less prominent words like "injustice" or "slave". What is important in this kind of pre-reading discussion is students' close attention to the words and how they might relate to one another and to the larger text that they represent. Students actively engage with meaning as they draw on background knowledge about words and concepts as well as on visual literacy skills.

The same "freedom" word cloud could prompt a discussion after reading the speech, guided by questions such as:

1-Do you think the word cloud captured what was most important to learn?

2-Are there keywords or ideas that are left out?

3-What terms reflect the main ideas? 

As students manipulate the word cloud's layout, color, and font, they integrate verbal and visual representations, strengthening the multimedia learning effect , while developing an important digital literacy skill in our visual society.

For some students, the creative design aspect serves as the hook to engage them in meaning making; for others, it is the words themselves that entice them to explore meanings and relationships. Although WordSift can be published to the public gallery and printed, another option is to use a screen capture program to save the WordSift as an image, creating a bank of images on your desktop or school server. They can then be inserted into a document, PowerPoint, class blog, or other text.

Hope you like and use this strategy with your students. 

Thank you!