Visualizing Student Journals

As students are journaling more and more during the COVID-19 school closures, their words offer valuable insights into their daily lives and the social-emotional challenges they face.  One way teachers can get a quick visual handle on how students are feeling is to upload typed journal entries into platforms that create word clouds and other text mining functions.  Voyant-Tools, a free platform, offers far more capability than just creating a word cloud (cirrus), but for student use, it can be used in a rather simple form. This guide explains how to get started. Or, watch the video demonstration.  After students create their cirrus or word cloud, they can send an embedable link to the teacher or take a screen shot.  Teachers could also collect student responses using Padlet or similar services.