Here’s a quick way to jazz up presentations and to offer a talking point.
It’s to generate a word cloud for an appropriate site, which you can do easily using Wordle.
Just type in a url, or copy in a section of text, and Wordle will generate a well-formatted tag cloud showing the most terms on that site (excluding English language filler words). It’s interesting, as they’re often not the terms that you expect to be used most.
Here’s a tag cloud for my main site at http://thomaslancaster.co.uk…
Interesting that the word research dominates teaching. It feels the other way around. I’m gla to note that students is prominent.
Here’s a tag cloud for this blog…
I think this one is more coincidental based on the topics I’ve been promoting. It doesn’t feel like I’ve written a lot about search. I’ll have to regenerate it when there are a few most posts on the blog.
Both of these are up-to-date at the time of processing, of course.
You can play around with these a lot to change the layout style and formatting, but I’ve found that even the randomised default settings will give you an interesting slide to include in a presentation.
Have you had any luck using word clouds? Just reply below and share your experience.