One of the things I've been playing around with is finding ways to incorporate tag clouds in my e-learning courses. Why tag clouds? Because they're a great way to visually communicate key points and concepts.

Knowing that PowerPoint has an easy way to fill shapes with pictures, the only challenge was to find a way to quickly generate tag clouds from completed storyboards. And that's where Wordle comes in!

How I used the effect

I originally thought this would make a good cover slide design. I added my e-learning script to Wordle and used the output as the cover design.

After spending more time with it, I think it can be used could be used for chapter, topic, review and quizzes.

A few more possibilities:

  • Tag cloud navigation. This can be a navigational technique or a flash-card inspired activity where the learner clicks each word to learn more
  • Tag cloud progress meter. Take a colored image and duplicate it. Make the second image grayscale and then selectively fade in the words based on where the learner is in the course. The tag cloud needs to be smaller but it would work.

 

Post written by David Anderson

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David Anderson
Michael Healy