I must admit this world of technology is quiet daunting for me. I still buy books from the book shop and I’m a self-proclaimed old fashioned pen and paper, note-taking kind of girl. So I went into designing my word clouds with an already impeding sense of dread. To begin with I tried using Wordle or Tagxedo as these were the suggested ones; I was unable to get either to work as according to the endless pop-ups I received my Jarva subscription was not up to date. At first I panicked however after some google work I found the program Word-it-out. I attempted this program and it actually worked. It took the very long rational and aims of the Australian Curriculum for the technologies subjects and turned it into a beautiful visual learning tool. This program was very easy to use and the only real skill needed was a pre-existing understanding of the copy and paste functions. It produced a very appealing visual learning tool that would help to get across key words and ideas of text. This could be used with very young children to learn sight words and with higher grades to introduce them to new subject topics. In the end i was very proud that I was able to eventually successfully produce my word cloud. I would definitely use a program like this when teaching as in the 21^st century visual learning tools are needed to entice and engage students who live in a visually saturated world (Younie, Leask & Burden, 2015).

Reference

Younie, S., Leask, M. & Burden, K. (Ed.). (2015). Teaching and Learning with ICT in the primary school. New York, NY : Routledge Taylor and Francis Group.