Georgia Heard's book Awakening the Heart is a collection of exercises designed to help students find poetry in their everyday lives. One of my favorite activities from this book is the Heart Map, which is a drawing that contains words and images that represents who we are as a person and writer. In my class, we refer to the heart map whenever we need an inspiration in our writing.
What's close to your bones? (Changing the language of the activity to appeal to boys)
As a teacher, I believe in giving my students choices in how they create this project. Some students love the artistic side of the assignment, but my non-creative students sometimes struggle with it. For the last several years, I have considered using Wordle, or an alternative word cloud website, to create heart maps, but I’ve always hesitated, not wanting to lose the heart shape component of the project. Luckily, there are now word cloud websites that allows the user to select a particular shape for their end product. These are my Top 3 word cloud websites I would use for creating heart maps.
1. Tagxedo: When it comes to creating word clouds, my students prefer Tagxedo over Wordle because of the site's ability to allow the user to customize the shape, font, and color of the word cloud. It is free, very easy to use, and best of all, it doesn't require a login and password! There are several variations of heart shapes built into Tagxedo. When students are finished with their heart map, most choose to screen grab it, but the website also allows you to print or save your heart map as an image file.
2. Tagul: Tagul is currently beta testing but looks as if it will have a promising future. Not only does the website allows users to create word clouds in specific shapes, but it also allows users to add links to the cloud, making it a more interactive experience for the viewer. The word clouds can then be easily embedded into a website or blog. Another plus? This site isn’t flash-based, so it will work with iPads! Each user account has a 20 word cloud limit. Since I teach approx. 140 students, I am creating multiple accounts and allowing my students to share a class login and password. Students can work on different word clouds in the same account at the same time (just not on the same cloud at the same time). This website works well in Chrome, but it’s still a little buggy in Safari.
3. Image Chef's Make Word Mosaic: This site offers a free and a "Pro" plan. The free version allows the user to create a small heart map, customize the colors and fonts, and save it to a computer. Unfortunately, the image is rather small and the free version of the website contains ads, which on my visit included links to pretty girls on Match.com… The "Pro" plan, however, removes ads and allows more customizations for your students, including the ability to save a larger version of your heart map. Image Chef is also creating mobile versions of many of their products, and perhaps one day in the future, there will be an app for Make Word Mosaic available to iPad users.
