Just for Fun

Here's a word cloud of my blog, as of 4/17/14:

I created this at tagxedo.com, but I also like wordle.com. It's fun to see which words come up again and again... I think they exemplify my focus as a language educator. 

Word Cloud

Confession: I love word clouds! But maybe that's not too surprising considering I'm a language teacher.... 

What is your favorite word cloud generator? I've heard Wordle.net is a good one, and the one I made below of a few of my posts on this blog is from Tagcloud.com.  It's awesome to see that "students" is the biggest word. I try to make my students the focus of all that I do in teaching, and it is evident they come up often in all of my posts. 

From Tagcloud.com

I think I am going to have my students create one for each of their papers and then one with all of them at the beginning of the semester. I am then going to have them analyze their vocabulary and compare it to what they've learned in class. I think word clouds lend themselves well to appropriate register and genre. 

Do you have any suggestions for activities using word clouds in class? Anything that you've done that works? I'd love some suggestions!