Although their popularity seems to have fallen a bit since their peak a few years ago, word cloud generators still provide students with a nice way to visualize the most frequently used words in a passage of text. Wordle is probably the best known tool for making word clouds, but there are plenty of others that accomplish the same thing. One such tool is WordClouds.com.

On WordClouds.com you can create word clouds in a variety of shapes and sizes with a wide array of color schemes. As you can see in the image below, I made my word cloud into the shape of a cat.

WordClouds.com works like other word cloud generators in that you simply paste a chunk of text into text editor then let the generator do the work of creating the word cloud. You can remove words like “the” and “it” from the word cloud. Finished word clouds can be downloaded from WordClouds.com in JPG, PNG, PDF, or SVG format.

Google Docs users will be happy to know that they can create word clouds within their documents. Watch the following video to learn how to do that.