I created a list of fifty unique words that describe myself or my interests before exploring the various word cloud tools. For almost all of the word cloud tools this was useful, as this allowed me to then manipulate the tool to achieve various results. It was not particularly helpful with Answer Garden though, as you must enter each word individually as a response to a topic or prompt. Despite this, I think Answer Garden would be a wonderful tool in a classroom library at the high school level. It would engage students and give live feedback, as each student could submit their own replies.
I did not enjoy two of the tools particularly due to the fact that they were very limited in their customization options. I feel that the Monkey Learn Word Cloud Generator would be a better tool for taking a paragraph of text to pull out key concepts or ideas. This would be potentially useful in collaborating on an assignment or subject with English teachers in the school setting. However, it was not very helpful in my efforts as it kept eliminating more than half of the words I had compiled. Word It Out did not offer a very large range of fonts and several of the fonts it did offer were difficult to read. Additionally, I often found many of my words could not fit in the cloud unless I reduced the difference in word size to the smallest possible “minor”. However, reducing the word size difference really takes away from any words standing out or grabbing your attention.
My unique word list and personal preferences seemed to be most compatible with Wordart and Abcya. Wordart seems to allow the most customization, allowing you to import images to define your word cloud shape, and being able to select font style on individual words or all in the set. I think this feature would allow a teacher to group words by font and thus connect ideas. For instance, perhaps they could create a word cloud based on a book and each unique font in the word cloud represented a specific character from the book. However, I also see a risk to losing harmony in Wordart by using too many fonts or colors. Reynolds (2014) advises, “a good rule of thumb is one or two (or sometimes three)”, when considering how many typefaces to use (p. 43). Abcya seems like a very accessible tool that is quick and easy to implement, and for teachers time-saving tools are a necessity. This tool’s functionality also aligns with Reynolds (2014) instruction to, “always keep simplicity in mind”(p. 61). It only utilizes one typeface at a time, and the color options complement each other to make for easy readability. I could easily see this tool being used in lower elementary school classrooms to display sight words. I can also imagine a school library media specialists creating information literacy word clouds to correspond with lessons or highlight key words and concepts from that week's read-aloud.
References:
Reynolds, G. (2014). Presentation Zen Design. (2nd ed). New Riders/Pearson.
Kiley, I found WordArt to be one of my favorite sites to use for word clouds too. I felt it had the most and easiest customization tools. I love how you mentioned the different font and spacing tools it allows you to use too. I thought this might be a fun way to teach how to use those text and font tips that we are currently learning. I also love your design of having all of your descriptor words revolve around you name, what a great idea!
I really wanted to love Word it Out, but struggled with the exact same thing you did. I'd give it a list of 100 words and it would use 30. Regenerate and it would use 42. I got frustrated with it after a bit. I missed that word art will let you import images. I'm going to go check that out!