Word Clouds in the Art/Music Classrooms

Ways to Use Word Clouds in the Classroom - by Michael Gorman 

http://www.wordle.net/

http://www.tagxedo.com/

http://wordsift.com/

Art and Music

1. Make a word cloud of the lyrics of a song.
2. Make a word cloud of a famous composer, musician, or artist’s biography.
3. Gather class, individual, or group input to come up with descriptive words to describe a painting, sculpture, work of art or song. Have a word cloud made of these descriptive words.
4. Make a word cloud that comes under a certain category. This could include artist, time period,instrument, or genre. Have students create a word cloud of one type of classification.
5. Have students experiment with word clouds to make their own work of art. They may wish to use Tagul and Tagxedo to make it even more powerful.
6. Create word clouds for different art projects. They can be CD, DVD covers. Use internet sites to create all sorts of items such as calendars, jigsaw puzzles, etc. at http://bighugelabs.com/. Or think about a t-shirt, mugs, and bags at a place like http://www.zazzle.com/.
7. Put original lyrics for songs or words for poetry into a word cloud. Superimpose that word cloud over an original picture.
8. Animate a Wordle using stop motion capability.
9. Superimpose a Wordle using green screen capability. This could include a bringing in a person that points and talks about some of the words or objects that appear as the words are described.
10. If a picture paints a thousand words… then why not paint a picture looking at words you have input into a word cloud?
11. Have students create a word cloud gift. It could be a poster or card for a special holiday for friends and family.
12. Students create a word cloud to illustrate their favorite artist or musician and do not include the name. They then present word cloud to class and students try to guess. Finish by including their word cloud as part of a poster with a picture of artist/musician, name of artist/musician, and paragraph about him/her.