Tech tac toe, Tagul!

My first Tech tac toe is Tagul.  Tagul is a collage of words.  I first got of taste of word clouds while attending a conference.  We were all asked to sign on through our phone and as the speaker asked questions we were to type in a word that represented our thoughts.  The frequency of the words determined the size of the words.  It was an easy way to see how most people thought based on the size of the words.  I found this very interesting so I decided to look into myself for this tech assignment.
There seems to be many variations of the word cloud collage such as Wordfoto,Word Collage,TagCloud, Visual Poetry, Tagul and many more. I used Tagul for my word cloud. After signing up/in, you have options to select a shape, font, layouts, color and choose preferred words. It can be based on theme, adjective that describes something, ideas, names and whatever theme of words you choose. Wth Tagul, you can choose however many times you want a word repeated.  For my little project, I chose a rainbow cloud and inserted words that started with "s" that describes me.  I chose the colors I like and the background and formed this little word cloud!~  

image link

Word cloud is a fun and creative activity for students to do as a project.  Students can connect key vocabulary words from a lesson,  list describing words, and even do a book report introducing story elements.  It's good for vocabulary building and listing ideas in a fun way.  There are many apps that are available so look into and try it yourself.  I certainly will be using this with my students soon.