Word clouds are fun ways to visualize the prevalence of different words, whether in an assignment, blog, discussion, or survey. There are a variety of apps that you can use to create word clouds, such as Wordle.
Tagxedo is a word cloud generator I have been playing with for the last couple of weeks and really like. It lets you take words from articles, slogans, speeches, letters, and more and turn them into word clouds. The size and boldness of the word relates to the number of occurrences of that word.
What I like about Tagxedo is that it gives you a lot of options to customize your word cloud. You can change the fonts and themes, make word clouds in real-time, save the images, use custom fonts, make the word cloud fit a shape (star, heart, animal, custom shape like a portrait) and much more.
You can also turn your word cloud into a mug, t-shirt or other gift (although not for free).
Word clouds are great to use with blogs, readings, and more to highlight the prevalence of words in a visual manner.
Here's a word cloud of Martin Luther King, Jr., shaped like his portrait.
