Nancy Duarte just posted a blog entry on Sunni Brown showcasing her new book, Gamestorming. This book includes more than 80 games to help you break down barriers, communicate better, and generate new ideas, insights, and strategies. I am writing this though for the five month old video she embedded. The video is described as: “Sunni Brown is the leader of The Doodle Revolution – a growing effort to debunk the myth that doodling is a distraction. Using common sense, experience, and neuroscience, Sunni proves that doodling is a way to ignite your whole mind.”

Sunni Brown at Duarte from Duarte Design on Vimeo.

Thanks to Christene, I found out about ABCya! Word Clouds. It’s similar to Wordle but more basic and perhaps easier for elementary students, though Wordle is pretty straightforward. Unlike Wordle though, a word will not become larger the more you type it. It is totally random but is easier and more coherent to save as a JPEG. Below is an example of my above text. Fonts, colour and layout can also be changed. You may be interested in other mapping, timeline and brainstorm tools here.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. I simply use a screen capture to keep mine. What a great way to save keywords for brainstorms in the classroom. Here are two I have created. One for story-telling and the other for myself. This has also been added to the “Cool Web Tools” page.