Word Clouds and Key Words

How do you identify the key words in your subject?

There is always a lot of vocabulary when you are teaching a subject in English, so how do you identify which are the most important words to define, explain, clarify, etc?

One tool which can be very useful for this task is a word cloud.  But how do you use them?  I am not very technologically adept, and I got stuck this week trying to use Wordle.  Then I saw another student on the course had made a word cloud using a different word cloud tool and posted it on his blog.  Thank you Juan Carlos!  http://juancartsxxi.blogspot.it/p/nubes-de-palabras.html So I did some research and found this page:

the-8-best-free-word-cloud-creation-tools-for-teachers

From here I tried a few and still had problems!  Then I tried Tagxedo:

http://www.tagxedo.com/app.html

And this one worked and did the things I was hoping it would do!

So here's my wordcloud:





I'm quite impressed with myself!  What do you think?  What subject do you think these words come from?

I created this wordcloud by simply typing in the keywords.  However, if you copy and paste text into the wordcloud tool it should pick out the key words for you.  Have a go and let me know if it works.

So now you know the key words, you have a nice image of the key words that you can print out and give to your students, and you can start thinking about how you are going to define, explain, show, clarify, etc. these words to your students, and you know which words you need to make sure your students learn.