Word Clouds (wordle to most) can be a dynamic tool for visualizing text and for presenting a group’s thinking. They are AMAZING!
While planning for the Future of Learning conference at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, I wanted to capture and share our participants’ views on “What are the key features of 21st Century Learning”. At first, word clouds didn’t cross my mind because in past experiences I had entered a historical speech, lecture notes or asynchronously generated google docs. All these use cases would be ineffective for our needs. But then it dawned on me, Socrative could aggregate our real-time responses. Of course!
Here’s the system.
1. Identify a question which will generate responses for your particular needs.*
- What 3 words best describe your summer?**
- What are you most excited about this school year?**
- What month were you born?**
- What are your 3 favorite foods?**
- What are the key features of 21st century learning? (reflected in the above word cloud)
- Which vocabulary words are giving you difficulty?
- List 5 key words from the chapter you just read.
- What 3 adjectives best describe this sculpture?
- What are synonyms and antonyms of _______?
* have students answer in all lower case so there is consistency in the word cloud.
** Import the quiz that includes these questions using SOC-337830
2. Initiate a Short Answer or Quiz.
- A Short Answer question’s responses will populate your teacher screen.
- A Quiz may include many questions and the results will be available to view as a googledoc or an emailed Excel file.
3. Highlight all the answers and copy them.
- Short Answer – highlight and copy the responses on the teacher screen.
- Quiz – highlight and copy the column of the question you want to visualize.
4. Paste into a Word Cloud maker
- Wordle – The most well-known word cloud tool. It’s easy to use and quickly adaptable to help you find the colors, fonts, sizes and arrangements to suit your taste.
- Tagxedo – Tagxedo allows users to create clouds in various forms, such as Abe Lincoln’s head, triangles or the outlines of countries.
- Wordsift – You can further highlight words by subjects such as social studies or science. Developed as an ELL resource at Stanford.
- ABCya! - Word clouds for kids!
- Word Collage – an App for iPads
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Love the idea of using a Wordle to spotlight common themes during class brainstorms/responses…I’ve never seen a word cloud used in this way, and I think it’d be a great discussion starter.
Also, a neat way to start off a unit – collect student ideas about the topic you’re about to study!
Ben -
Interesting unanticipated use for Socrative in the classroom! Now I need to think about ways I can incorporate the idea into my classes and PD at LC….yet another challenge.
Nice idea on integrating with word clouds such as Wordle. I’ve been using Socrative in my iPad workshops and the teachers replied that Socrative was one of their favorite tools! I can’t wait to share this idea with them.
I think I will use it the first day of class as a way of coming up with classroom rules. The kids get to write them down and see it in a unique way!
Can’t wait to share this tool with the teacher’s I co-teach with! Thank you.
Great idea – just wish there was a way to create a word cloud directly on an iPad. All the solutions above use Java. Anyone know any non-Java word cloud creators?
Word Collage works w iPad
Are your responses still limited to only 50? Is there a way to up that (or is it best to just create a duplicate quiz/etc. for more groups/people)?
50 represents the number of students logged in per activity. You can have the same activity utilized by multiple groups of 50 throughout the day. Thank You
What a great way to make word clouds collaborative!