Word clouds and Voki: two useful tools

Word cloud or tag cloud is an image that contains words. If you enter a text and some words appear more than once, the word cloud gives more prominence to those words. There are a variety of word clouds generators on the internet that are free.

Voki is a tool where you are able to create your own talking character. You can choose from different characters or even one of yourself and then, you give them voice by recording yourself or you can write the text and Voki will do it for you.

We can use word clouds and Voki, in order to make students work in a different way in the classroom. We can provide them with a word cloud containing vocabulary or words, to form a definition of an important concept. Then, via Voki, they can check if they did it well.

• Here is an example of an activity that we create using word cloud and Voki.

First, we will present students with a word cloud containing vocabulary related to countable and uncountable nouns. They are supposed to complete a chart that have two columns, one for countable nouns and the other one for uncountable nouns.

As there are many generators to create a word cloud, we decided to work with Tagul, just because we found it very easy to use it.

After that, we will ask students to go to Voki and check if what they did is correct.

You can go here in order to look at Voki.