Of all the different word cloud generators, I felt like WordItOut was the most likely candidate to show up in one of my lessons. WordItOut had the clearest line to the “create” function, which informed my thoughts about why I would rather use it as a tool with high school aged students. Although the color options and patterns are a little bit more limited than WordCloud Generator (my second most likely choice to use) or ABCYA, I felt like the simplicity and return of product from WordItOut was higher quality overall.

There are a few ways that I might utilize the WordItOut tool with students. In a Language Arts classroom, I would ask students to track words that they would use to describe a character and add them into a word cloud to represent the character traits associated with that character. In a Social Studies classroom, I might ask students to review a passage about an event or idea and have them chart the most commonly used words to have a visual representation of the way those events/ideas are viewed by society. Of course, this could also be used as a “getting to know you” activity in the way that we have done here; this might be a nice one to use at a semester change when you have all new students in your classroom!