I’m sure all of us have a favorite song. Maybe even several. Perhaps you’ve always wanted some way to express the lyrics of one of your favorite songs into something visually stunning. Word clouds make this possible and you can really put some time into artistically creating custom images with the lyrics to songs.

I took what a lot of people might consider one of the best songs of all time, Imagine by John Lennon, and turned it into a wordle using a stock image from tagxedo.com. With it you can see the main themes in the song and, obviously, tell which words are used most often.

Some of the fun of doing this for yourself is trying to figure out what you believe the central themes of the song to be and matching an image that you think fits the song then putting the lyrics into that image and see how well you’ve matched them. For instance, I thought Imagine went well with the peace symbol, but looking at the finished product I could have also used a cloud or globe since “dreamer” and “world” are so heavily used throughout.

Hopefully you can enjoy using word clouds in this way and other ways. It pays to be a little creative and stretch out your ideas to include different ways to use wordles. Turn all of your favorite songs into word clouds and then share them with others.

Hopefully you have taken some time and actually put a wordle maker into some use just for fun. While wordles can be whimsical and serve no greater purpose, sometimes you can incorporate them into being something a lot more useful. One of the best uses of the wordle can be in a classroom environment either as a teaching tool or as a student assignment. There are a great many things you can use a wordle maker for when it comes to education and together we can discover some of the easiest ways to introduce them into your class.

1 – Student Highlight

As something you can use as a first day of school project or if you use a Student of the Week in your classroom, a wordle is something that you can use to highlight your students. You can have the student spend some time writing out things about themselves such as their strengths and favorite things and rank them. Then, depending on the technology in your classroom, you or the student can use those lists to enter in your favorite Wordle Maker even using some photos to shape the wordles based on items on the student’s list.

2 – Guess the Story

You can use a Wordle Maker to immortalize a story and based on the key words that show up in your wordle you can have your students try to guess which story it is. This works great for both children’s stories and classic novels if you use your words wisely.

3 – Highlight Important Speeches

You can use the text from important speeches in history to show the students the importance of ideas that each speech conveys. For instance, Wordle Word Cloud has a wordle made from the Gettysburg Address shows that Nation, Dedicated, People, Great, and Dead were the top 5 words used by President Lincoln in that speech.

4 – Wordles for Democracy

When you want to take a vote from the entire class you can display the results as a wordle as a special treat for your students. It makes the reveal more dramatic and a lot more fun.

5 – Unique Craft Projects

There are special occasions where teachers need to use a craft project as a gift. This works great for holidays such as Mother’s and Father’s Day where you can have students use some words they would use to describe their loved ones or some of their favorite things then use the Wordle Maker to create the wordle spelling out MOM or DAD and throw some pictures of the children.

So there is just a smattering of ideas that might help you incorporate your favorite Wordle Maker into your classroom. If you have any other tips please don’t hesitate to share them with us!

Making wordles are fun and can add a lot of flare to anything you are doing with them. Whether it is on a website or as part of a school project a wordle is the way to go. You can create your worlde on any of the amazing sites from our home page and the process is usually painless and fun, but we have some tips and tricks for you to make your experience even better.

• To multiple words into one you can use the ~ character. For instance if you wanted to combine a sentence into one wordle “word” you can type in worldes~are~fun and have that show up as one word. This can help you insert popular quotes instead of just words into your wordles.

• By default most all of the wordle creating sites turn off common words like the, and, or, of, but they can usually be turned back on depending on the place you are creating your wordles so if you’re looking to include those you’ll have to manually turn that ability back on.

• The above tip is also true of numbers that you might want to include when creating your wordles.

• Some of the wordles you can create can be in custom shapes. This is not true of every wordle creating site, but some of them will allow you to upload a picture and base your wordle around that new shape. Wordle Word Cloud has a good collection of custom shaped wordles for you to check out. I think my next article will be about how to do such a thing.

Hopefully using these tips will bring new life to your wordles and if you have any tips or tricks to add please leave a comment below.