“Ken, do you know how to turn students’ responses into a word cloud easily?”
“I don’t, but I can build a free tool for you to generate a word cloud easily during your in-class polling,” I replied.
Situation: Word cloud is an effective tool to boost interaction in online, hybrid, and face-to-face lectures. For example, it can be used to show where students are coming from, or which brand of cars they like to drive.
Complication: Word cloud can be generated using Tableau or other dataviz tools, but the set up can be complicated. Also, the ability to (i) eliminate common words (e.g., a, an, the, of…etc), (ii) re-shuffle the words, and (iii) display the word count frequency are often lacking in existing tools.
Question: “How can I generate a meaningful word cloud easily during my lecture?”
Answer: That’s the challenge my colleagues and I faced back in 2012. After failing to find a good solution, Prof. Paul Lam and I decided to add the word cloud functionality to our Presentria tool so that professors can generate a word cloud in 75 seconds or less during their in-class polling. Special thanks to Prof. Robert Ott of Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University) for sharing his ideas and contributing to the development of our Word Cloud functionality that has benefited thousands of educators around the world.
Learn more: https://presentria.ca/product-feature-word-cloud/
Info about Presentria Basic: https://presentria.ca/presentria-basic/
Cheers,
- Ken