Choose the activity by age
These are suggestions from classroom practice, not curriculum requirements, and any of them can be shortened.
Ages 5 to 7: a shared picture
Children say one word about a story, a season or the class trip, and you type it. Keep to fifteen or twenty words so the board is not crowded. Ask which word looks biggest and why that might be. The point is noticing that a word chosen by several children grows, which is early practice in reading a chart.
Ages 7 to 11: noticing an author’s habits
Type in a page of a class reader, or a paragraph the pupils wrote themselves. Ask them to predict the three biggest words, then check. Follow with a question that needs reading rather than counting: which small words tell us more about the character than the big ones do?
Ages 11 to 14: revision
Paste your own revision notes or a glossary and let pupils predict the five most frequent terms before you generate. Because the tool simply counts, you can raise a word’s prominence by writing it more times in the list. Tell pupils you have done this and why.
Ages 14 to 18: reading a text critically
Generate separate clouds for two speeches, two poems or two newspaper articles on one subject, and compare. Then ask what the clouds fail to show: tone, irony, sentence structure, what is left unsaid. Students who learn to distrust a tidy picture have learned something worth more than the picture.
Vocabulary and revision, week to week
A cloud makes a quick starter or plenary. Run the same prompt at the start and the end of a unit, save each PNG with the date, and put them side by side. Ask pupils which words are new. For vocabulary lists, a cloud is a display, not a test; the real learning comes from asking pupils to use the biggest words in a sentence of their own.
Worked example: twenty-four one-word answers
A class is asked, “Name a feeling the poem gave you.” These twenty-four answers were invented for this page, one per line:
calm · lonely · sad · lonely · cold · quiet · lonely · sad · peaceful · calm · not alone · lost · lonely · calm · free · cold · sad · calm · hopeful · lonely · not afraid · quiet · calm · peaceful
With the filler-word filter off, the tool finds 12 different words in 26 total, because two answers have two words each. The counts are:
| Word | Count |
|---|---|
| calm | 5 |
| lonely | 5 |
| sad | 3 |
| cold | 2 |
| quiet | 2 |
| peaceful | 2 |
| not | 2 |
| alone | 1 |
| lost | 1 |
| free | 1 |
| hopeful | 1 |
| afraid | 1 |
Calm and lonely tie at five. The tool keeps tied words in the order they first appeared, so calm comes first. Now switch the filter on. It deletes not, and the cloud shows alone and afraid as if two pupils had felt those things, when each said the opposite. Only 11 different words remain and the meaning has flipped. This is the single best reason to leave the filter off for short pupil answers. If you do want the filter on, ask pupils for a one-word answer such as comforted or unafraid instead of two words.
Notice also that peaceful and calm are close in meaning but counted apart. A good discussion question is whether they should be combined, and who decides.
Pupils’ words and privacy
The tool processes text inside the browser on your device, and it has no accounts. Your school still decides whether it is happy for you to use a new website with pupils. Department for Education guidance for schools says that all staff have a responsibility to protect personal data and that, where unsure, they should follow their school’s policies or ask their data protection officer (GOV.UK, Data protection in schools, read 21 October 2026). That guidance is written for maintained schools and academies, and independent schools may also find it useful; if your school is not covered by it, follow the rules that do apply to you. The Department’s page on procuring educational technology adds that most such tools collect personal data about pupils, parents and staff and that processing must follow data protection law (GOV.UK, Procuring educational technology, read 21 October 2026).
Practical habits that cost nothing: never type pupils’ names into the box, watch for answers such as “Ben’s dad” that identify someone indirectly, and keep younger pupils off the website themselves; the privacy policy says the site is not directed at children under 13. The page also carries adverts, so download the PNG and show the picture rather than the live page.
Making the cloud accessible
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines say that non-text content needs a text alternative that serves the equivalent purpose (W3C, Understanding Success Criterion 1.1.1, read 21 October 2026). A downloaded PNG has none, so provide one yourself:
- Share the count table, like the one above, as text, on the slide or printed in large type.
- Write alt text that names the five or six biggest words and says what the text was.
- Do not use colour alone to carry meaning. Leave vertical words off and choose the Ink theme for strong contrast.
- Offer a hands-on version: pupils sort word cards into piles and count the piles, which also suits pupils who cannot see the board.
If you only need a quick tally, the checker at the top of this page is enough. For the picture itself, see the general guide.
- Do pupils need accounts?
- No. There is nothing to sign up for, and the tool keeps no list of pupils or answers.
- Can pupils use the page themselves?
- The privacy policy says the site is not directed at children under 13, so for younger pupils the teacher should type the words and show the result.
- Should the filler-word filter be on for one-word answers?
- Usually off. The filter removes words such as not, no and very, which can reverse the meaning of short answers. The worked example above shows two answers losing their not.
- How do I stop spelling mistakes splitting the count?
- Correct them before you generate. The tool counts every spelling as a separate word, so lonley and lonely would be two entries.
- Can I show it on the board without the adverts?
- Yes. Download the PNG and show the image on its own instead of the live page. The picture contains only your words.