Word Clouds

In Portland, I bought a fun book full of ideas for teaching Language Arts with fun technology tools.  One of the suggested activities is to have students visualize their use of language by pasting their writing into word cloud generators.  In the past, Ive noticed that many of the word cloud generators on line are BLOCKED for my students by the district filter.
I expect the sites are blocked because they have galleries, and some users use questionable language when making their clouds.  Blocking the sites for this reason seems weak to me.  All my students that are old enough to use these tools have certainly encountered swear words before.  They understand that   they don't use that language just because someone else perhaps does.  Kids are smarter than that.  Online, just like in real life, encountering inappropriate content is a matter of "when", not "if".
This is why, when I teach about about going online, I explicitly tell them what to do and how to behave.
Enough about my beef with the internet filter.  This week I'm going to see which of the word cloud sites are unblocked, and show the kids how to use them.  I am hoping that they can paste their word art into their blogs.  I will give the students this list of word cloud generators to try, and we will see what we will see!