I think that most people have seen word clouds these days but I recently popped the text of one of my blogs into Tagxedo and was really surprised at what came out. Before now I have helped people to create contrived clouds with an explicit embedded message but my own cloud made me re-realise their actual purpose as a great way to picture text. Examining my own result (above) showed me what an effective way they are to summarise a piece of text in a fun way, particularly when you add a relevant shape into the presentation. I found my cloud interesting to read as it showed me the emphasis of what I had written, something which is not easy to do when you are just scanning text. I thought I would flag word clouds here in case you needed some way to encourage students to examine or explore some text with a twist.
If you have never created a word cloud and would like to give it a go then try out the following suggestions.
Online
Wordle http://www.wordle.net
Tagxedo http://www.tagxedo.com
Tagul (account required) https://tagul.com
Word It Out http://worditout.com
iPad
Word Salad (free version has watermark)
Cloudart 69p
Visual Poetry £1.49
Word Collage 69p