Word clouds and virtual talking characters.

Last Monday we worked with two interesting tools that we can introduce to our classrooms; word clouds and Voki:

A word cloud is ‘an image composed of words used in a particular text or subject, in which the size of each word indicates its frequency or importance’ (Oxford dictionary). In the lesson, our teacher asked us to create a word cloud with a definition/description of a concept related to web 2.0 and post it on Edmodo. The rest of our classmates had to guess what expression we were referring to. This is just an example of how we can work with word clouds with our students, but we could also use them for brainstorming, or to make learners visualize the most important words/ideas in a text. In this post in Edudemic you will find 5 ways to work with word clouds and in this slideshare there are other practical examples. 

Our teacher suggested us to use tagxedo, wordle or tagul, and I’ve been trying other word cloud generators and I would also like to recommend image chef. It is very easer-friendly, it has really nice fonts and you can create a word mosaic with different standard shapes or you can draw your own. I’ve created one with words related to this subject, ECO II.

Voki is an educational tool that allows users to create their very own talking character. Given the fact that we can choose different accents for the characters, it can be useful to prepare presentations since it may catch students’ attention. It might be also beneficial for those students who are rather shy as they can record themselves and speak through a character. Blabberize is a similar tool where you can upload any picture and record yourself to make it say whatever you want. Placing your character’s mouth is a bit complicated but you can always place it, try it, come back and modify it how many times you need. Give it a chance!

I highly recommend you to go and check these two useful tools; there are multiple ways of working with them and your students will definitely enjoy them.