This post is updated in November 2021.
Below is a collection of some of the best tools and mobile apps to use to generate word clouds. A word cloud is a visual representation of text. Word clouds can be used for numerous pedagogical goals including as exit tickets, check students reading comprehension, conduct formative assessment, survey students, and many more. Students can use them to summarize long reading passages, to write book reviews, to scan long texts for gist, use them as prompts in writing projects, and many more.
I have arranged these resources into three main categories: web tools, word cloud generators for Google Drive, and iPad word cloud generators aps. For a more recent post check out my favourite Wordle Art Makers for Teachers and Students.
I- Web-based Word Cloud Generators
1- Tagxedo
“Tagxedo turns words — famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters — into a visually stunning word cloud, words individually sized appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurrence within the body of text.”
2- EdWordle
“EdWordle is a tool for editing “word clouds” based on the Wordle. The initial word cloud can be generated from the input text or read from an existing one. You can re-font, re-colore, resize, move, rotate, add and delete words to create custom visualizations.”
4- Word Art (formery Tagul)
“WordArt.com is an online word cloud art creator that enables you to create amazing and unique word cloud art with ease.Professional quality results can be achieved in no time at all, even for users with no prior knowledge of graphic design.”
5- Word it Out
WordItOut enables you to create beautiful wordle art. Some of the features it provides include:
- “Customise more settings than any other word cloud generator
- Create word clouds from sentences, whole documents or tables.
- Decide how to filter that text, which words to display or remove, and tweak their importance with ease.
- Design your word cloud as you like, find that perfect layout, choose your own colours, fonts and sizes (and how to mix them), or let WordItOut find a random look for you!
- Keep control of your word clouds
- Share your word cloud with the world (or keep it secret!)
- Easily embed them on your own website (as big or small as you want)
- Download your own copy as an image file
- Get any word cloud as a present or gift on a T-shirt, card or more…”
II- Google Drive tools for generating word clouds
1- Word Cloud Generator
This Google Workspace add-on works on Google Docs allowing you to generate easily generate word clouds to insert directly in Google Docs. Some of its features include:
- “Download the word cloud
- Insert in document in two sizes
- Download to your computer for use in other applications
- Use an Advanced Tab that lets you play with the word cloud
- Choose your favorite palette
- Control the # of words you want to display in the cloud
- Drop specific words (with type ahead help)
- Insert a word count table in the document”
III- iPad word generator apps
1- Wordsalad
“Make great word clouds out of documents or sentences that matter to you! With Wordsalad, you can make beautiful word clouds, super customized with different fonts, colors and words layouts. Some of its features include:
- Import or write any text from files or Wikipedia articles with a single tap
- Customize your salads with great fonts
- Color your salads with fancy palettes
- Feeling creative? Wordsalad gives different layouts to position your words
- Share your salads on all your iOS devices
- Export your salads to camera roll for later reuse and export them to PDF (with vector graphics!) and Photoshop
- Full mouse and trackpad support on iPadOS!”
2- CloudArt
“Unleash your creativity by making beautiful word clouds on your iPad. Simply give Cloudart some text from a web page or paste some into the app and it will automatically create a gorgeous word cloud for you in seconds. Some of its features include:
- Lots of great color schemes
- Loads of fonts to play with
- Many layout styles
- High resolution saving of images (jpeg and PDF)
- Reload your saved clouds for further tweaking
- Edit individual words within a cloud to change their emphasis or remove them.”
3- Word Collage
“Select color theme, font and layout for making of stunning word clouds that can be used for various purposes. The most common words in the input text are showing bigger size to distinct it among other words. In the result you receive a high-resolution image that can be saved or shared. You can use it for teaching, learning, visualization and many other ways. It’s the ultimate tool for turning words into a descriptive picture. Some of its features include;
- 6 Layouts: Horizontal, Vertical, Half and Half, Mostly Horizontal, Mostly Vertical and Any
- 80 Color Themes
- 45 Fonts
- Pan and zoom
- Save the collage to your photo library, send it by email or share it with your friends
- Universal app. Collages work on iPhone and iPad.”
4- WordFoto
“You’ve probably heard the tired cliche about a picture being worth a thousand words. We’ve taken this phrase quite literally and created WordFoto, an app that turns photos and words into amazing typographic works of art. Some of its features include:
- Fast fully automated space finding, word filling algorithm.
- Manage and create your own word sets.
- Eight unique Preset Styles.
- User definable Custom Styles with parameters for brightness, contrast, fonts, etc.
- Import images from photo album or camera.
- Crop editor.
- Inspect detail in full resultion zoomable preview.
- Manual fine tune parameters.
- Resulting word images are 11MP for 64-bit devices and 5MP for 32-bit devices.”
These tools and apps which were featured in the initial version of this blog post are no longer available: ABCYA , Tagul, Drive Word Cloud, Visual Poetry app, Tag Cloud app.
