Word Clouds - EDED20491 Week 5 Post #5

Group 4 tools - Word clouds
Engagement activity: Try anything you like! Anything that catches your eye, imagination or attention!

Some suggested tools for Group 4 are listed in the Learning Engagement section of Week 5.

The Group 4 tool that I decided to explore was Word Clouds or Tag clouds. The words in a Word cloud are weighted and give greater prominence to those words that occur more frequently in the source text. Though at first glance they may appear to be a simple, one-dimensional tool I think that word clouds can be a really useful tool in education. They could be used to illustrate a point, for a simple analysis of a block of text and to give feedback to students. They are useful in the creation of infographics to visualise data. Word clouds can be used to quickly see and understand the most prominent terms in a given text. 

The only application program that I had heard of prior to investigating word clouds was Wordle. So I chose to explore Wordle which, according to the website, is "a toy for generating 'word clouds' from text that you provide.  You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends" (http://www.wordle.net/).

During my exploration I found that they are several free Word Cloud generators that could easily be used in education.

• Word clouds for kids - aimed at primary school age children.
• Tagxedo - Word clouds with styles.
• Worditout - also has the facility to print them on items such as cups.
• Tagul - has the option to link every word to a Google search.

For more information on teaching with Word clouds you should check out Free Technology for Teachers.

The great thing about each of these tools is that you can upload words from a document or you can link them to a web feed. The image below was created in Tagxedo and I inserted my blog feed after I had posted my analysis of the three presentation tools. I chose the colours and the shape. It allowed me to limit the number of words displayed to 50. I then saved the Tagxedo cloud to the website and copied the embed code into this blog. I was impressed with how easy and simple it was to use. This process took me about 15 minutes.

Figure 1: Tagxedo cloud of my blog posts for Presentation tools in the shape of Australia

I tried to use Worditout as it looked interesting but after creating the word cloud it went into a loop and I couldn't save my example. So I can't provide my evidence of useage of Worditout in this blog post.

Wordle Exploration
The following video is a tutorial on the use of Wordle. Most of the applications have a similar format and the ability to change the number of words displayed etc.


Figure 2: Wordle tutorial (Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhL5D9nz5aI)

The following video describes how to create more advanced Wordles.

Figure 3: Advanced Wordle tutorial (Source:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czup64zYRGo)

My first Wordles are shown below in Figures 4 and 5. I entered my blog URL to feed words into the Wordle. My last two posts were on PowerPoint and Prezi as presentation tools (I hadn't yet published the post on Glogsters). In Figure 5 I refined the original graphic by changing the colours and the font and reduced it to displaying 50 words only. Original was 150 words. I think that the second Wordle is cleaner and easier to read.


Figure 4: My first Wordle (http://www.wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/6564354/Jo_Luck%27s_Blog)



Figure 5: My first Wordle after applying some of the (http://www.wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/6564364/Jo_Luck%27s_blog_50_words)

The Wordle in Figure 6 was created by copying the words from the mobile phone wiki into Wordle. I reduced the number of words displayed to 50.


Figure 6: Mobile phone analysis Wordle (http://www.wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/6564389/Mobile_phone_wiki)

Critical reflection on using Word clouds

Pluses	Minuses	Interesting/Implications
Free tools available on the web.	Does not understand phrases or multiple words such as 'educational technology' or names eg Barack Obama. Can get around this by joining words eg Barack-Obama	The visual impact of Word clouds can be very effective. Some of the websites will allow you to make the words clickable so the word cloud can be used as a starting point to investigate a topic.
Easy to create and manipulate the appearance of the word clouds.	Common words are not displayed. If you are using word clouds to assist students with their writing you may want the common words displayed so that you can show the student that they are using some words too often or not enough.	Could be used to assist Visual learners to write better. If they enter their own writing into a word cloud they can see if the words they are using fit into the theme of the essay they have been asked to write.
Visually appealing. By entering the text of an essay or poem visual learners will be able to quickly determine the main points or themes thus helping them to critically analyse the text.	May not appeal to verbal / aural learners.	I like the idea of using a web cloud to show students their own feedback. See example in discussion below.
Has the potential to motivate students to engage with reading and writing in new ways.	Because word clouds prioritise words by frequency of use, key concepts may be excluded because the words used to describe a concept appear infrequently in a text.	I like that Tagxedo allows you to create the word clouds in particular shapes. The chose of shape can add to the understanding of the word cloud.
A good way to summarise a lot of information in a graphic image.	Doesn't support collaborative learning on its own. Could be used as tool to link to/from another technology.
Your finished Word cloud can be output in either three ways.  Printout, link to webpage to be viewed in a public gallery or you have to manually screen capture it and create a digital image.	It is annoying that some of the programs do not have a button to generate a Jpeg Image or something similar that you can insert into other digital tools.

Personal reflection on creating word clouds and how to utilise them in my praxis.

Word clouds are simple and easy to use and thus give good value for minimal outlay of time. Something very important when we are all stretched for time. I can envisage using word clouds to teach concepts such as 'Compare and Contrast'. I would also use it to assist students to work out themes within a given text. A word cloud at the beginning of a long piece of text could help the student gain an overview of the text before they read it. I acknowledge that I am a visual learner and that does influence my opinion of why it is a useful technology to add to my digital teaching toolkit.

The following video explains some of the ways that Wordles could be used for teaching.


(Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4Pul5vyaNc)

Other Resources:
Wordle guide for educators http://edgalaxy.com/journal/2010/1/22/the-ultimate-guide-to-wordle-for-educators.html
http://www.livebinders.com/play/play?id=125422


Using Word Clouds in my teaching

My teaching context is to teach year 8 & 9 students in the subject areas of IT and Mathematics. The school is an all girls school. The following is a list of ideas on how I can use word clouds support student learning by visualising words and using them to support and extend students reading and writing skills.

• Create a word cloud of the contents of an online discussion to extract the main ideas or themes.
• Combine student introductions to illustrate how many things the class has in common.
• From a mathematics perspective the algorithm that creates the word cloud could be explored to work out what weighting is given to words and why.
• Condense survey data by dumping the responses to a questionnaire into a Word cloud generator.
• Combine news articles, blog posts or RSS feeds on a given topic.
• Turn an essay or report into a poster.
• Use them to compare and contrast what is important in a given text.
• Use them to introduce a topic:
• for example, mathematics
• 
• (Source: http://www.wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/980568/Mathematics)
• or technology
• 
• (Source: http://www.wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/4099199/technology)

One of my colleagues has used word clouds to illustrate a point of view. The image below was created by a Multimedia specialist at CQU to emphasise his view that technology is the tail wagging education. He has uploaded this image onto a website that prints them onto stickers, t-shirts etc. See, http://www.redbubble.com/people/rolley/works/9703402-edu-doggy

'Edu Doggy' Created by Rolley Tickner CQU (Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/david_jones/8235400311/)

A former colleague has used word clouds to provide a low level analysis of student feedback in a class (see http://davidtjones.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/how-are-they-going/). What he did was to do a brief survey of students in the class to ask them what they learnt and how they were faring and what was concerning them. He then fed the comments into a word cloud generator which provided him with a good overview of how the class was coping with the course content. He then used that feedback to adapt his teaching the following week.

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***Tasks to complete at a later time

Group 4 Technologies

This group of technologies is open-ended. We have added some that have been shown to be valuable, and recommend strongly that you examine them regardless of your selection for this group. Knowing that they "are there" may open up opportunities for later work with ICT when it is required.

But you may have ideas of your own - please feel free to run any tool/techology/site past your lecturer and ask if it is suitable for your first assignment.

Digital Tool: Animations and Simulations

Animations and Simulations offer substantial advantages over print based material when it comes to complex interactions and abstract concepts. They can also offer a virtual experience where the real thing is too expensive or difficult to provide for the students. Animations and simulations are Web-based so they can be made accessible for the students use anytime and anywhere rather being restricted to the classroom.

It is important, as ever, to consider the learning purpose of these interactive resources. They do not, on their own, constitute learning. It is your wisdom as a teacher and learning designer to embed them into a larger learning context.

Engagement Activity 5: Interactive Learning Objects (optional activity

Engagement Activity 6: Adobe Flash (optional activity)

Engagement Activity 7: Google Earth (optional activity)

Engagement Activity 8: Google Maps (optional activity)

Engagement Activity 9: Google Docx (optional activity)

Engagement Activity 10: Online concept mapping (optional activity)

Engagement Activity 11: Online timelines (optional activity)

Engagement Activity 12: Zooburst (optional activity)

Engagement Activity 13: Museumbox (optional activity)

Additional technologies suggested by Wendy.

Tools to concentrate on if you wish to explore further, are Titanpad, Corkboard.me, Padlet and Popplet!