I really like the concept of word clouds. I think they can be a great resource in helping to determine what is important in reading, both for students and adults. They work well for getting to the heart of a piece of writing, whether that is the Declaration of Independence or Moby Dick. And there are a lot of good, free word cloud tools available with a nice variety of features: WordClouds.com, ABCYa! Word Clouds, Tagxedo, Wordle (website is no longer available, but there are desktop versions), TagCrowd, and Pro Word Cloud (which works inside PowerPoint), just to name a few. But there’s a new word cloud generator available that has something the others don’t, and that’s an easy way to manipulate the cloud that is created. Say hello to WordWanderer.
Tags: reading • Tool • Web 2.0 Tool • word cloud • WordWanderer • writing