Wordsalad

Have you ever heard of a word cloud?  A word cloud is a visualization of a group of words that bring focus to main ideas.

Some ideas on how to use word clouds in your classroom are: 

• To brain storm a topic or create a discussion either inside the class or online
• Use them to teach vocabulary
• Give important ideas from a discussion or video
• Show understanding of a concept or vocabulary word
• Highlight class expectations
• Use students' first names to create a class word cloud
• Describe a character in a book
• Express ideas in a different way
• Make posters

A free app that is free and easy to use to create word clouds is Wordsalad.  With this app, you can customize the font, color and layout of the words, and words that are more important can be made bigger.

Wordsalad comes with word clouds already made to give you some examples, but it is super easy to generate your own!

First, tap the + on the top left hand corner.

A "New Salad" menu will come up.  

In the top white box, you will type the words you want to be in your word cloud or "salad".  You can type the words out by hand or copy and paste a group of words from Safari or Notes.  

You can choose to turn "Stop Words" on or off, which will take out commonly used words such as articles, prepositions and conjunctions out if you turn it on.  This option also lets you choose which language you are typing in.  

The "Auto Fill Words" option will add words to fill the space.  When this option is on, the size of the words are chosen randomly.  

"Use Join Character _" means that if you want 2 words to stay together, then put _ in between them.  For example,  Roland_Story will be treated as Roland Story instead separating the 2 words if that option is turned on.

"Skip Numbers" will take out all numbers if that option is turned on.

To make more important words larger, type the those words multiple times.  As you can see, I typed out character_counts and the pillar words several times to make them bigger in the word cloud.

 Next, you will tap "Start" in the top right hand corner of the screen, and your word cloud will generate!  In the blue box on the bottom of this screen, you will find different options to customize your word cloud.  The briefcase in the bottom right will allow you to decide exactly how you want it to look.  The paint brush lets you change the font and even customize a pallet.  The letter A allows you to change the font.  The sheet of paper changes the format, orientation, and density of the words.  The ruler then will let you change the layout of the words.  If you tap the arrow on the right side of that blue box, it will close that menu.

Now you have options at the bottom in the blue box that will make changes for you instead of you choosing the exact settings you want.  You can also save your word cloud when it looks the way you want it to.

This is what your finished product will look like!  To get rid of the watermark in the middle of the picture, you will have to download the paid version of the app instead of the free version. 

Sources: http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2013/09/6-great-apps-to-create-word-clouds-on.html, http://charactercounts.org/sixpillars.html