Word Cloud Reflections

~*Cloud of Goals*~

Word clouds are something that I used to do with my students all the time. I'm not sure why I stopped other than I felt that it was getting overplayed when students started to make them in every class. I really enjoyed this activity and using word clouds to reflect some of my personal learning goals for the upcoming school year. In building a word cloud you are forced to sum up the goal in one or two carefully chosen words. Looking at my word cloud I can see by my chosen words what is of the most importance to me. I have been working this summer in building a choice-based art curriculum that focuses on the authentic artistic processes of the students. I can see that this is reflected here and that a huge piece of this is to continue to build and draw from the professional learning community that I became a part of after my participation in the NAEA conference last March. 

I created this word cloud with Tagul on wordart.com . I chose this site because of the three suggestions it was the one I hadn't yet tried. I loved the choices that this website gave for designing the cloud as compared to the other sites that I had used in the past. For classroom resources I would utilize this site again. However, I didn't like that I needed to create a login to save my cloud and the language/ layout could potentially be very confusing for my students. 

In order to make word clouds with my students I need  a program that works well on a chromebook and preferably does not need a login. I think, depending on the grade level, Wordle or ABCya work best for this. The design choices are somewhat limited but the bigger focus for the younger students is really more about word choice (lest we have 200 word clouds full of A's and The's!).  I'm looking forward to thinking creatively about how to use word clouds in my classroom in the future and which format students could use to effectively share without printing the clouds.