Cool Tool Blog Entry IV: TagCrowd

For my fourth cool tool review I decided to take a look at TagCrowd, which is a website that generates word clouds. Word clouds are images that are composed of words in a certain subject. The words that are used more frequently appear much larger in the picture compared to those that aren't used as often. 

TagCrowd homepage

The use of word clouds in the classroom can be beneficial to students. I think that one of the obvious benefits of a word cloud is that it can help improve a student's vocabulary. Using the word cloud allows you to see which word you may be overusing. From there you could use a thesaurus to identify some synonyms that you could put in place of that word you're overusing. Word clouds can also be used as an icebreaker or a "get to know you" tool. As a future math teacher, I think that  I would use word clouds as a pre-assessment tool for lesson vocabulary. This can obviously work in other subjects as well. 
TagCrowd is a free to use website, but you can donate money to the website. TagCrowd is very easy to use and takes little to no time at all to learn how to use. The website lets you create a word cloud by letting you type in words, by pasting in web page url, or by uploading a plain text document. As you can see in the picture above there are options that you can choose from that include language selection (over 15 languages to choose from), how many numbers you want to show up in your word cloud, and allowing the option to show the number of times a word is written. There is a "frequently asked questions" section to help answer some questions that users may have and there are contact and blog sections on the website. 
Unfortunately I could not find an option to customize the font style or color, which leaves the word cloud looking a bit ordinary. I also was not able to connect to the blog section of the website. Despite there short comings I find the website useful and is something that I could definitely see myself using in the classroom. 

The cloud that is generated when I type in the url for my blogspot