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.
WordSift is another visualisation tool that was created primarily for teachers. It works just like Wordle but just a bit better.
All you need do is paste in the text and then sit back. The sifted words then show up in orange or green and the fun really begins. This tool would be lots of fun on an IWB as well as on your own computer.
Don't miss checking out the About section for more thoughts on using it.
helpful visual when teaching about the overuse of common words in student writing. Either type in or paste in some text from student projects and let the students analyze the results.