Word clouds for revision

Another tool I have found useful for revision is Word Clouds/Wordles/Tag Clouds call them what you will!

I have used them in a couple of ways in the last few weeks and shared these ideas when I met up with Rachael Stevens and Fran Nantongwe at the beginning if April and they were really positive about them.

Firstly I’ve used them to highlight key words from the exam specification. Each student had one in to stick in their books and we displayed it on the Interactive Board. I gave the class a few minutes to discuss the words and how we have encountered them already in our learning. Pupils were great in their feedback and I enhanced the discussion with clear explanations of what was expected of them in the different parts of the exams.

Secondly I have used them alongside the ‘reduction’ principle to help highlight key words from or about each chapter of ‘About a Boy’. For homework, I have years 10&11 chapter summaries for the 36 chapters of the novel. Their task was to highlight the key parts from the chapter summaries then reduce the main parts to 3-5 key words.

E.g.

I then sifted through the pupils’ reductions and made a word cloud for each chapter.

It was quite a long process but worth it I think.
I then plan to upload these to the VTE for pupils to access and also print them off and display them around my classroom as a helpful visual aid. I love visual things but hopefully coupling this with the reduction principle will be helpful in getting pupils to remember key things from the chapters.

Kathy 😃👍