Using Word Clouds in EFL ESL

I've just discovered Wordle, which is a really useful site for creating word clouds. The word clouds are created by entering either a text, URL or del.icio.us user name into a field. The site then generates a word cloud based on the frequency of key words in the text or webpage.

Here's what a word cloud based on the URL of this blog looks like.

The word clouds are really easy to create and can be printed up for classroom use or saved to a gallery on line. To see how this is done watch the tutorial movie below.

• How to create a Wordle word cloud
• You can download a higher quality Quicktime version here (Right click and the 'Save as')
• Or download for i-pod / i-Tunes here
  

How to use this with EFL ESL students
This is a wonderful flexible tool to use with students.

• Revision of texts - You can paste in short texts that your students have studied recently. Show them the word cloud and see if they can remember what the text was about and how the words were used within the text. You can build up a bank of word clouds over a semester and pull them out at random to get students to recall the texts they have studied and the key vocabulary in them. You could also see if they could rewrite or reconstruct the text based on the word cloud.

• Prediction - You can create word clouds of texts before the students read or listen and ask them to make predictions about the content of the text based on the word cloud. They could also check any new words from the word cloud that they are unsure of before they read or listen.

• Dialogue reconstruction - You can create a word cloud of a dialogue students are studying and use it as a prompt to remember or reconstruct the dialogue.

• Short poems / Haiku - You can generate a word cloud from a short poem or Haiku, then ask students to create their own work based on the word cloud. They could then see how close they came to the original.
  
  

• Text comparison - You can create word clouds from a number text genres (news article, poem, story, advertisement, dialogue etc.) and then see if the students can decide which genre each is from and why. You could also do this with a small collection of poems short stories or articles. Then students could read the complete texts and match them to the word clouds. Here are two poems. One is from Shakespeare and the other is from Robert Frost. Try to decide which one is from Shakespeare. How did you know?
  
  
  

• Personal information - You could get your students to each create a text about themselves and then turn it into a word cloud. You could them put the clouds up around the class and see if the students could identify each other from the cloud. They could exchange clouds and use them to introduce each other.

• Topic research tasks - You can create a word cloud based around a topic you want students to research. You could use a page from Wikipedia to do this, then use it to find out what students already know about the topic by asking what they think the relevance of each of the word is to the overall topic. They could then go to Wikipedia and find out more. Then report back on their findings using the key words as prompts. Here's an example I created by cutting and pasting the intro text on Cairo
  
  

• Learner training - This is a good tool for students to use regularly to help themselves. They can regularly make copies of the texts they study and pin them up to revise them or keep them in their gallery on the site. They could even create word clouds of their study notes to help them revise.

What I like about it

• It's free, quick and very easy.
• You don't need to register or part with an email address so it's a low risk site to get students using.
• The word clouds are very attractive and will stimulate more visual learners.
• Having key word prompts is a great way to support more fluent language production, but avoids having students just reading texts.
• It's nice that the students or you can customise the design and choose colours and fonts that they like.
  

What I'm not so sure about

• Would be nice to have a more effective embed code for blogs (There is one, but it's not very effective) I've used a work around to embed these ones.
• Saving the word clouds as PDF is possible, but again a bit tricky unless you have a MAC (That's another good reason for getting one)

I've really enjoyed trying out this site and creating word clouds. Hope you do to. I'm sure the list of suggestions above is by no means exhaustive, so if you have any ideas for how to use this with your EFL ESL or other students, by all means post a comment and share your ideas.

Related links:

• Prompting reading speeds
• Animating vocabulary
• Interactive multiple choice activities
• Picture phrases

Activities for students:

• Learn Some Cliches
• Using Word Clouds to Remember Words
• Improve Your Vocabulary and Make Friends

Best

Nik Peachey

Picture phrases

Phrasr is an interesting new website that allows users to input sentences, phrases or even entire paragraphs and then turn them into illustrated slide shows using Flickr images. All you have to do is type in your phrase and click, you then get an image for each word. If you don't like the image you get then you can change them and when you are ready you just give your work a name and title a click to publish. What you then get is like a slide show of images with words.
Here's an example of what it produces. This one is based on the old expression;

• "You can take a horse to water but you can’t make it drink"

Here's another based on the first verse of a Shakespeare sonnet (130)

• Sonnet 130

Once you have created your picture phrase you can either send it to a friend by email or go to the archive and find it to copy the URL.

If you want to see just how quick and easy it is to create these then

• watch this short Flash tutorial movie (800k)
  

How to use this with students
This is going to revolutionise learning, but I can think of a few nice tasks you could use this for.

• Get students to illustrate a short poem or haiku.
• Create some idiom movies to help students remember them.
• Use the site to make revising / presenting grammatical structures structures a bit more interesting.
• Get students to write a short story and create an image version of it.
• Discuss why certain images seem more or less appropriate to illustrate various texts.

What I like about it

• This is a really simple free site that you can use to quickly create materials
• Nice variety of images

What I wasn't so keen on

• It would be nice to have an embed code for these so that you could add your finished sentences to your blog, rather than a hyper link back to the site
• Be careful some images are not appropriate for younger learners
• Some people tend to abuse sites like these, so be careful of inappropriate sentences or immature students who tend to play around.

Hope you enjoy this simple tool and find some good uses for it. Drop me a line if you have any others to suggest

Best

Nik

Animating vocabulary

I've just been looking at a useful websites called Gifup that enables users to quickly and easily create animated gifs / image sequences like the one below. This seems to me a like a really useful way of revising and teaching vocabulary.


What are the sports?

This is a gif that I created to revise some sport vocabulary. It took about 3 mins to make using images from Flickr.

Here's a tutorial movie showing how I made it. (1.2Mb swf)

It was very simple and just involved searching around my key topic and selecting a few images. Then a couple of clicks and the site generated my gif and gave me an 'embed code' to add it to the site. (See my previous tutorial to find out how to embed images and video into webpages on your desktop)

How to use this with students
Collect up gifs related to any vocabulary area you want to teach or revise. Embed them in an html page on your desk top and start a collection. Each time you add new ones send the html page to your students. (They will need to have a live connection on their computer to be able to view the gifs)
Ask them to make notes of any words they relate to the images they see.

What I liked about it

• It's quick and easy and there are lots of images available
• There are some really nice images
• It's great that you can embed the gifs into your materials

What I wasn't so sure about

• There are also some images which may be unsuitable for your students, so this is a resource for teachers to create materials rather than one to let students loose on
• I'm not sure what the copyright arrangement is with the images they are using
• Be careful about the speed that you set on your gifs, faster ones can be dangerous if anyone in your class is epileptic

On the whole Gifup isn't going to revolutionise your teaching, but it is a useful little tool that you can use to enhance thee teaching process. Please leave a comment if you have any other suggestions for how to use this.

Hope you enjoy it.

Best
Nik

Multimedia wordsearch

This is a really nice tool that I have just discovered. It's called PhotoSoup and it generates wordsearch activities based on any topic in just seconds.

It's very simple and works on images from flickr. You simply type in your topic and the site automatically generates a word grid and image clues. You then have 90 seconds to find all the words. You can get hints and even get it to show you the answers.

Watch a short video to see how it's done. (499k swf)

How to use it with students

• This is great for vocabulary revision, especially with higher levels. Students could even learn some new vocabulary from it.
• It would look great on an interactive whiteboard (IWB) or you could give students a collection of vocabulary themes and get them to work on their own.
• Good to use as a filler for students who finish early
  

What I like about it

• It's free
• Each wordsearch it generates is pretty much unique
  
• The timing adds an element of motivation and competition to it
• It's just so simple
• I tried a random selection of very unsuitable words that students might put in and it seems that those words are censored, so you don't have to worry so much about badly behaved students looking at unsuitable images
• It's actually quite tricky

What I'm not so sure about

• Because it's based on the tags that images are given the words can sometimes seem a bit tangential
• It's actually quite tricky
• You can't save your wordsearches (Actually I've just discovered that you can. If you look at the top of the page you can click 'embed puzzle' and this will generate a code that will enable you to embed the wordsearch into a webpage or blog)
  

This is the kind of site that might have been custom made for language teaching.
Hope you find it useful and your students enjoy it.

Best

Nik

Making quizzes for i-pod

With the growth in interest in mobile learning and the ubiquitous nature of the i-pod among our younger (and increasingly older) students this piece of software looks like a really useful tool we can use to extend learning beyond the classroom.

The software I’m referring to is I-Quiz Maker. You can download I-Quiz Maker for free at:
http://www.iquizmaker.com/

Once you’ve installed it you can make quizzes using either True / False question types or Multiple Choice questions. The quizzes a very simple to make and you can make as many questions as you like and as many quizzes, as you like.

• This demo tutorial shows you how to create the quiz

This looks like a really useful tool to:

• help revise and develop your students vocabulary. You can write a vocabulary quiz and up- date it each week with new words that your students have learned
• get the students to create quizzes for each other and share them
• set up revision exercises

Although there is a bit of work involved in creating the quizzes, once you made them you’ll be able to keep them and use them again with other students.

Once you have finished creating your quiz you can then export it to your desktop and it can be uploaded to the I-pod through I-Tunes. The only catch here is that you and / or your students will need to buy the I-Quiz game for your I-pod. It is really cheap though (less than 1 US dollar / 79 p in the UK) and it does come with some ready-made quizzes.

What I like about it

• You can set the quizzes so that students get a maximum number of questions in each game and so that they loose after a specific number of wrong answers. This should make it more competitive.
• The game will randomise the questions so you could input 50 questions and they would get 10 or 20 random questions each game.
• It’s very easy to use and is just simple point and click
• You can update quizzes so that they grow as your students’ knowledge grows
• There's a version for PC and for MAC!
  

What I’m not so sure about

• Students will need an i-pod, they can’t just run the quiz on their computer or i-Tunes
• The game is only compatible with Fifth generation i-pods (This may become an advantage as more people trade up to more modern versions and the older ones become available more cheaply second hand) which isn’t much help for students with older i-pods.
• I couldn’t get the user manual to download so there wasn’t much documentation to help me learn how to use the software
• I think there may have been one more question type, but I couldn’t get the button for it to work ??
• Students will have to buy the I-Quiz game (though as I said it’s quite cheap) and that means setting up an i-tunes account.

On the whole though, despite the above drawbacks, if you have a classroom full of students who carry i-pods about then this could be just the thing for you.

Let me know how it goes

Best

Nik