Of all the word cloud website choices in the Sandbox, Word Art was my favorite.
Tagxedo required a link from a website or blog from which to glean popular words. I’m interested to try this service at the end of the MLIS program when my blog has many posts in it. MonkeyLearn asked for a large body of text about myself. I uploaded my Reading Autobiography that I just wrote for the other class I’m taking this semester — LIBS 642: Children’s Literature Across the Curriculum PK – 8. MonkeyLearn made some very odd choices for the words that it highlighted, and I did not like that it demoted proper nouns to lowercase. Though I appreciate e. e. cummings, I prefer to capitalize appropriately. AnswerGarden has definite potential as a classroom brainstorming platform or informal assessment tool.
Word Art was a lot of fun to play with. It’s extremely easy to use, and there’s a lot of room for customization and creativity. I started by entering in words about myself, then I chose some key words to enlarge. Once I found that I could choose my own font and cloud shape, I was in love.
I really appreciate that the original image allows the viewer to hover the mouse over each word to temporarily enlarge it for easier reading. Unfortunately, I was unable to embed the interactive image here.
I hope you enjoy my Word Art word cloud and get to know me a little better.
I love your selection of a rainbow, with the bright colors. That’s a really interesting idea — to create a word art graphic of our portfolios once they are more flushed out! I’ll have to keep that in mind.
Your word cloud is beautiful! I love how you tried out all of the different sites, to find your favorite. Word Art is my favorite too. I need to play around with posting on my blog. I like the layout of yours and have found WordPress tricky to navigate. Keep up the great work!
Amy
I loved using the Word Art site. It was a lot of fun to play with! Your Word Cloud is really nice. It’s very calming. :)
I like the Word Art site as well. It’s neat that your name is in the middle of your word cloud. How did you do that?
Pure luck, actually! I know that’s not helpful. You can move words up to the top of your list, which can prioritize them, and changing the font size helps as well. It doesn’t seem that you can move individual words into certain spots, but clicking “visualize” until you get the right balance and placement seems to be the best option.
I love you rainbow! The colors are very calming and the overall image just makes you happy. I also went with Word Art. I liked their selection of shapes and the ease of the tools over the other options. I also love to cross stitch! Have you tried diamond painting? They’re so much fun! The idea is much like cross stitch.