Word Clouds and Voki: two interesting tools

Sometimes, teachers do not have the necessary time to think of different tools that can make the lesson more attractive. Trying to do so, we end up including things that may not work so well, or students do not understand how they work or how to use them. But that is not the case of word clouds and voki. Not only are they engaging, but they can also be easily created and included in the lesson.
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English define a word cloud as “a drawing of the words used in a speech, on a website etc, with the more frequent words shown larger and the less frequent words shown smaller”.

There are plenty of websites where you can create your own word cloud. The ways this tool can be included in the lesson are innumerable. For example, we used it for a game: someone designed a word cloud with a definition of a word, and the rest had to guess which word was. Since the only thing you have to do for creating a word cloud is to write a text, teachers (or even students) can use it for summarizing a text, a short story, among other things. 

The other tool that is mentioned in this post is Voki. This personalised tool allows you to create a speaking character or avatar. The voki will say the text you type with the voice you choose, or you can record your own voice! An easy way of integrating this tool in the lesson is to use it as a key to solve an activity. For example, we used it to solve the guessing game with the word cloud.

Although these tools may have some disadvantages - as all tools do -, we think that the most important thing to take into consideration is the fact that sometimes the voice the Voki has is not clear enough. The solution to this is to record our voice and to speak in the speed that students are used to.

All in all, these two tools are really interesting and should be taken into account when planning our lessons. Moreover, it is important to highlight that both are free and easy to create: either by teachers or by students.