App to Make Word-Clouds

High Intermediate
Paraphrasing
App - Cloudart

Many course books ask students to paraphrase what they have heard or read in the book. I find this task really challenging because such input often brings a high amount of words students simply do not know or cannot pronounce well. I downloaded an interesting app that works like my big time favorite word cloud maker wordle. In this activity, I had students underline keywords in a text about Jane Gooddal`s life that could help them paraphrase it. Then, we worked on meaning and pronunciation by having students use their own devices to access dictionaries. I projected the word cloud I made on Wordart while they were working on the vocabulary, and asked students to paraphrase the text, using the words they had chosen. I was impressed by how much awareness was raised, and I was happy to notice that students were taking risks while consciously trying to use new vocabulary items.