Word Clouds

I have always found Word clouds really cool and intriguing. They are a nice way to visually engage students with text, but until now, I had never explored ways to integrate them into a language course.

Today I taught a seminar and discussed word clouds with pre-service language teachers. I particularly enjoy brainstorming seminars, where you first illustrate the tool and give an idea or two of how you think it could be used, then you let participants input additional ideas for implementation. That's the format we followed today.
These are some of the uses we discussed:
- Project it on the screen at the beginning of the lecture to have students guess and anticipate what the topic will be about
- Practice for oral presentations using Word clouds rather than an outline
- Scramble sentences and have students put them in order
- Use word clouds as inspiration for speed writing or creative writing activities

I have come across this article on Language Learning and Technology that overview the use if Wordle in an action research project conducted in a Spanish course
http://llt.msu.edu/issues/june2011/actionresearch.pdf