【Wordsift】: The Word Cloud Generator

What is Word Cloud?

This is an example of a word cloud? What do you think the topic is about?

Word Cloud turns text into a visual representation or an information graphic. They are easily created by pasting text in any language into a free word cloud generator, such as Wordsift and Wordle. The word clouds, or visual representations of text, give prominence to words that appear more frequently from the original text – in other words, the more frequently a word appears in the text, the larger its size in the visual design. Besides, users can normally print out their clouds or embed them into their blogs or websites.

         Introducing WordSift. How to use it?

WordSift (http://www.wordsift.com/) is an online word cloud generator that I found very useful in certain aspects in teaching language. Its webpage is very straight forward and easy to use. There are just two steps to create your own word cloud:

• Copy your text and paste it in the box at the homepage
• Press "sift" to visualise your text

These are all you have to do! ;)

  Why do teachers and students like WordSift?

What I like about WordSift is that actually not just about it can create pretty images with words, instead, this website can also be a great visualisation tool that can become a catalyst for discovery, understanding, insight and discussion with students about a particular text or texts!

The following are some of the functions that WordSift can perform:

Concordance Analysis

1. If any of the words in your word cloud is clicked, you will be shown at the bottom of the page that how this particular chosen word is used in the text that you have pasted in. it is effectively concordance analysis of the words in the text. Hence, it is a potentially great tool in just focus on a/ some word(s) and teachers can use this opportunity to highlight the different usages of the same word in the passage to their students.

As soon as the word "Atmosphere" is being chosen, WordSift will automatically show you where this particular word is used in your text.

Organise words based on Frequency of use, 

Alphabets and Genres

Word Cloud for a text about Greenhouse Effects

The word cloud will show you the 50 most frequent words which are used in the text you have pasted in and they are sized differently based on the frequency of use of the certain word in the text. For example (See the left), I have pasted a text about greenhouse effects in WordSift. Then, my word cloud have had all the most frequently used words such as atmosphere, greenhouse, earth. energy, gases and global appeared in larger size compared to the rest.

Besides, WordSift enables users to organise the words based on their frequency of use in English. In this way, students can straight away view the differences very clearly and learn some of the most common words used in English. To organise the words, you can just click on “common to rare” or “rare to common”. In addition, you can also organise the words alphabetically and you can also use it to analyse words from different genres. For example, you can choose to highlight all the words related to either Science, Math, Academic Writing, General Services and etc. (See below)

 After I clicked on the "Science" button in the "Mark" column, all the words related to Science is highlighted in RED colour 

Show words related images, videos & Thesaurus

What's interesting is, WordSift will present a series of pictures and videos which are related to the selected words in order to assist the users to understand the words meaning quickly and more in depth. Moreover, if you click on any of the words in the word cloud, you will also see a visual thesaurus where the word and its related meanings are shown pictorially. 

When I click on the word "atmosphere", 

images and videos related as well as thesaurus are shown at the bottom of the page.

How can WordSift be used in an ELT context?

Prediction

1. The teacher creates a cloud and then show it to the students in the class. 
2. Based on the cloud, students have to predict what the topic is or what the content of the text might be. 
3. Perhaps some comprehension questions can be asked by the teacher as well, and students have to predict the answers by referring to the cloud. 

It will be so interesting to contrast the students' predictions about the text when looking at the cloud and then what the actual content of the text is. In fact, this activity can be carried out as a class activity or teacher can print out clouds and give them out in groups.

Dealing with vocabulary

1. You can paste a text which you want your students to read later into WordSift and produce a cloud.
2. Then, ask the students to look at the cloud and choose 3 words they do not understand. 

Benefits: 

1. It is time saving and easier for the teacher to deal with the vocabulary problems since students do not need to read through the whole text but instead, just look for the unfamiliar vocabulary items within the 50 most frequently used words in the text. 
2. It is easier for teacher to mainly focus on the most common/ important keywords in the text because those words are put in a larger font size. Therefore, teacher can only choose to explain the meaning of the big-sized words to students. Whereas the rest can be skipped since do not understand about the meaning of those words would not really affect the students' comprehension of the text.

Comparisons

1. Get students to make word clouds of their own essays. They can make them at home, print them out and then bring them into the class.
2. In the class, students can be put into pairs. 
3. Have Student A to predict 3 contents of the essay from student B’s cloud and student B does the same with student A’s cloud. 
4. ** If all the students have written the same composition, then students could compare their clouds to see which words they have in common and write them down in a list.

Some limitations of wordsift

1. Not colourful enough / Only have one font type 

The cloud produced are all in green colour and if you clicked on some words or genres, those word will change to red colour. That's it! Hence it would be kind of boring for students because most students like colourful stuffs with pictures.

  2. The clouds produced are not in certain shape but randomly arranged.

Unlike Tagxedo and Wordle (another two word cloud generators), Wordsift does not have the function to arrange its cloud into certain shapes and therefore, makes the appearance of the cloud rather dull.

As you can see below, the cloud produced by Tagxedo and Wordle are much more colourful and good looking than that from WordSift. And they have different font types to be chosen from too!

Examples of clouds from Tagxedo:

 

Examples of clouds from Wordle:

 

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【Zimmer Twins】: Directing your own stories

What is The Zimmer Twins?

The Zimmer Twins (http://www.zimmertwins.com/) is known for its unique format which combines online participation and broadcast delivery. Young language learners are invited to create and share animated episodes using a story editor and library of animation. The users can either create endings to short, professionally produced story-starters or produce a totally new story based on their imagination. Users tell their stories by choosing characters, actions, props, expressions and settings. They can also add their own dialogue and on-screen text. Then, a selection of the user-generated episodes is produced into broadcast shorts and air on Teletoon, which is a Canadian Animation Network.

Below is an interesting Youtube video on "The Making of The Zimmer Twins" :

How to use The Zimmer Twins?

1. Click on the "Make a Movie" button and you will be brought to this page.

In order to have your clip saved, you must sign up yourself first to get an account for the Zimmer Twins page. After that, you can start making your own movie clip.  Click here to watch a tutorial clip on how to get started with your first Zimmer Twins movie!


1. You can either choose to create endings to short, professionally produced story-starters or produce a totally new story based on your own imagination. If you choose the previous, you need to pick a story-starter from the selection on the screen; but if you choose to create your own, you can click in the "Make From Scratch" button.

Then you will be brought to this story editor where you can start creating your story 

2. From the story editor, you can get many varieties of animation selection, such as you can choose your own characters, settings and props. After that, you are free to decide each character's facial expressions, emotions as well as actions. Also, you can add on dialogue and on screen text on your short animation clip. This is so fun! Even me as a teacher feel so exciting in creating my own animation. Look at the slide show below, it shows you a series of animated files which Zimmer Twins offers: 

3. After you have finished narrating your story, just click on "save movie" button before you put in a lovely title and short description for your story.

For more information on how to use the Zimmer Twins, please view the teaching video below prepared by Russel Stannard:  http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/zimmer/index.html

Why do teacher and students like the Zimmer Twins?

1. Autonomous learning 

Students will become more independent in learning because they are the one who in charge for every tiny part of their movies. They can do whatever they want, such as choosing their favourite characters, deciding on the characters' lines, story background and etc. Students' thinking skills can be also enhanced greatly as they produce the movies all by themselves, and perhaps with only some guidance from the teacher.

2. Fun and Motivating

Zimmer Twins offers different characters with different personalities and traits for the students to choose from. The characters can sing and dance, can travel on time and do some craziest stuffs. It totally opens up the door of possibilities of what the students can actually think of. The anticipation and preparation of students to add dialogue, select scenes and come up with their own story endings are absolutely worth while and amazing! It is really cool when you see that students come out with different stories every time and you can totally enjoy their awesomeness!

3. Sense of ownership

Students will have a sense of ownership towards their finished works because they have put in a lot of effort in organising their ideas and present their story in a nice and favourable way. Therefore, after putting in so much hard work, they will feel proud of it and enjoy the feeling when people appreciate their works.

How could Zimmer Twins be used in language learning context?

1.  Teacher sets a context and has the students to create a story about it

As you can see from the heading that a teacher can actually provide the students with an interesting title or context such as sports day, rescuing someone from a difficult situation, an argument and etc. Then gives the students more room to imagine themselves about how they want the story line to be. At the same time, the teacher can introduce the students to a meaningful set of vocabulary related to that particular context so that they can put the vocabulary items into usage when they are setting up their own stories. After all, the movie making has been turned into a kind of personal process where the students can do whatever they want in the movie before publish it to their audience. In fact, not only the activity encourages students autonomy and creativity, but also helps them in contextualising a situation/incident and learning to use suitable words to describe it.

2. Students create story endings based on the story starters

Like what you can see in Zimmer Twins' page, students are given the opportunity to continue progressing the story line of some uncompleted movies into the complete ones. Hence, the short plus professionally produced story starter can assist students to activate their background knowledge about some events, and then they come out with some extraordinary ideas to finish the story. Students are given freedom and right to decide how the ending of the story would be. Therefore, this can highly motivate them as different students have different creativity level. Besides, students will feel so much delighted if they can share and exchange ideas on each other's story.

Some limitations of The Zimmer Twins

1. Movie cannot be embedded

The biggest limitation of Zimmer Twins is it does not allow the users to embed their finished works into any other websites or blogs. This is kind of sad because students cannot share their works with other people who are not Zimmer Twins users.

2. Have to pay for VIP Membership

The users have to purchase VIP membership so that they can publish their movies publicly and have other users watching them.