Wordle.net in an awesome site that creates "'word clouds' from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends." (Information taken directly from wordle.net.) For example, suppose you are doing a unit on the Civil War. You can enter key terms such as: Abraham Lincoln, Emancipation Proclimation, A War Between Brothers, North, South, Union, Confederate, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, and more, into the text generator. The results would look like this:
You now have a colorful poster for your classroom that either you can create for your students, or you can create with your students as a whole class, that shows key terms of a unit study.
I really liked this tool! I think that because my deaf/hard of hearing students are so visual, this would be a good way to get them to see words associated with any given topic. Hopefully by simply seeing the words, students will become more familiar with them, with how to spell them, how to sign them, how to lip read them, and how to pronounce them.
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