Tagxedo

I stumbled upon www.tagxedo.com a few year ago and I absolutely love it! 

Instead of making standard word clouds like in Wordle you can make word clouds in the form of almost any shape. 

There are so many uses for it in the classroom!

To Show Symbolism

• Choose a symbol (shape) and put words commonly associated with the symbol inside of it
• Once completed write a paragraph about why you chose this symbol/these words and what it symbolizes

To Compare and Contrast 

Students can paste in text from documents (they will need to make two separate tagxedos) and then click "Word/Layout Options" -->Advanced-->Slide the Deja Vu scale up. 

The words used the most in a piece of text will be larger. 

I pasted in the inaugural addresses of both Bush and Obama below:

Bush 2005

Obama 2013

Students could compare and contrast these by discussing the differences in the most commonly used words in both!

Example:

They both discuss the nation quite a bit

Bush discussed the government more than Obama

Students could then make inferences to why these differences and similarities exist!

To Introduce

If you have access to a computer lab at the start of the year students could input words that represent them or items that they like. If they like something MORE they should repeat that word several times (when the tagxedo is created that word will show larger) 

Synonyms

There is a neat option where you can make the shape a word!

Click "Shape" -->"Add Words"

Students can input a boring word as the shape and then fill it with more interesting synonyms for that word!

Inference

You could input quotes from novels you have read or words associated with a specific topic you are studying and have students infer what novel/topic it relates to and explain why!

I used quotes from Harry Potter for the image below!

Improving your writing
I found this idea at: http://blog.tagxedo.com/101-ways-to-use-tagxedo-completed

How could you use Tagxedo in the classroom?