Wordle is great for quickly creating word clouds from chunks of text. Last week I used Wordle to make a word cloud of President Obama's State of Union Address. The complaint that some people have about Wordle is that it doesn't offer much in the way of customization options. That's where Word It Out shines.
Word It Out creates word clouds out of any text that you paste into the word cloud generator. Once the word cloud is created you can customize the size and color scheme of the cloud. You can also customize the font used in your word cloud. The feature of Word It Out that I like the best is that you can choose to have Word It Out ignore any word or words you choose. Ignoring words keeps them out of the word cloud.
Word clouds created using Word It Out can be shared publicly by using the embed code provided by Word It Out.
Applications for Education
Just as with Wordle, Word It Out can be a good resource for students to use to quickly identify the words used most frequently in a text. Create a word cloud and have students discuss why certain words were used frequently by an author.
Friday, February 5, 2010
Word It Out - Like Wordle With More Options
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11 comments:
Great post! Thanks for sharing. I'm definitely going to check it out.
Not to be a negative nancy, but Wordle does all of the things you mention - size, color, font, even ignoring specific words. Based on what I see from Word it Out, Wordle is actually a much more powerful option and, in my opinion, is far more visually appealing.
One way I've used Wordle is to have students paste their own essays in and analyze their word choice. It's a great way for students to look at the words that they use most frequently - it helps them realize that "cool" isn't really one of the main ideas in their paper.
Thanks for sharing. I was only familiar with Wordle, but Word It Out looks interesting.
This is the answer to my problems with Wordle and math facts. I found that it doesn't recognize the "=" sign, this does! Thanks so much for sharing!
thehurt,
All good points, Wordle does do those things. I found Word It Out to be much more intuitive when it comes to altering displays.
Richard
I agree that Word it Out looks better and is easier to format, but having to supply an email address to save and/or get the embed code is a problem for my under 13 year old students. We can take screen shots though. I just wish there were more online resources that didn't require an email to use them. That might make a good list for your next post!
Thanks for sharing. I'll have to check it out. I use wordle for a class building activity. First I have students list all the nouns about them (girl, student, daughter, sister, bike rider...) Then they leave their list on their desk. The class rotates from desk to desk adding adjetives that describe their classmates.
I have to say that Wordle is a little more user friendly than Word it out, and it does all of the things you mentioned in your post. I teach elementary students and I like Wordle's option to print your cloud. I did not see this option on Word it out (Did I miss it?) I post the clouds my students make on the wall outside my classroom for the whole school to see. Since I teach elementary students who have limited time in the lab on the computer this is the best way for them to see the clouds and share instead of just using the online gallery.
That being said thank you for showing an alternate to Wordle, since our school uses website blocking software you never know when I might have to find an alternative site that isn't blocked!
I just tried both Wordle and WordItOut for the first time. A very interesting new utility for me. Thanks!
I found both to be about the same ease of use and have similar customization, but prefer Wordle for 2 reasons.
1. I like being able to have some words vertical. I think it makes the end result more interesting.
2. I like not having to bother with an email account.
You should compare Word It Out to TagCloud.com. I prefer the latter because of its size. In Wordle's legaleaze "You may not use the applet on your own web site or, as a
library, in your own work." But these other two sites give you code to embed on your website. Tagcloud gives you the option to make a PDF file.
As Wordle is not an option right now (legal problems). I have been experimenting with Word It Out.
As someon has said it's great that it copes with the = sign. It seems that other symbols are possible also.
http://worditout.com/word-cloud/1663
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