Tagxedo

We were looking at ways of promoting language in classrooms recently and this caused me to revisit some of my favourite tag and word cloud generators. In doing so I had a play with Tagxedo once again and wasn't disappointed. Not only can you create a great variety of word clouds, but you can create them in different shapes with plenty of different colours and fonts. This in itself is cool, but the best is yet to come. Apparently you can actually embed the cloud  and it becomes interactive, with words zooming in as you hover over them.  You can't do that with Wordle (my favourite tag and word cloud generator of all times).
Check out my latest Tagxedo.

(This is not the embedded version as I have had little success with this feature, but would love to hear from someone who has gotten it to work.)

TweetCloud- What are You Tweeting?

This just came in over twitter from someone you need to follow if you aren't already doing so, Joyce Valenza.

TweetCloud is a  useful little Twitter tool  that allows you to create word clouds from your tweets, very much in the same way that Wordle creates tag clouds from text. I had a play with it and the results are below.

It would appear that my tweets for a month are a bit video-centric, not exactly what I had expected. The one below is from a year of tweets...Useful Tools and Ideas are the trend, must be all the SimplyBox-ing.

I am now working out ways I can use this tool with my students when they use Twitter  for collaborative research. They each have individual accounts through which they could generate their own clouds and display the main topics they are researching. If you have a class Twitter account it would be an interesting way of visualising the content of your Twitter stream with the students who have contributed to its growth. If you can think of any other ways to make this a part of teaching and learning, do let me know.

For now, have a play with TweetCloud. All you need is an active Twitter account.