Fun With Text

 Wordle is a website that enables you to create free word clouds using whatever text you choose, and then customize the design to your liking. The more frequently a word appears in the text you enter, the bigger the word will appear on your cloud. In the classroom, teachers have used this tool to help their students learn spelling and vocabulary words. It could also be used in reading to help the students identify main topics or themes in stories which they are assigned. Tagxedo is a very similar website to Wordle, but after using them both I developed a preference for Tagxedo. This is because instead of simply scrambling the selected text into a cloud, Tagxedo allows you to arrange your words into one of the many shapes they have available, making the end product more interesting. Furthermore, all of the variants of the design you create are saved in a history, so you can compare each of them and select the one you like best. Finally, Tagxedo also provides a Google document on their homepage titled 101 Ways to Use Tagxedo, which includes several creative ways to use the website in education.