This is very cool. I was just scanning through the transcript of one of the twitteresque chats that were happening during my sessions in Maine. Someone, Amy, suggested a web site that offers tag clouds for major presidential speeches, mostly inaugural addresses.
The URL is http://chir.ag/phernalia/preztags/. The interface is not very intuitive. There’s a bar above default speech, 
George Bush’s Jan 2007 State of the Union Address. You’ll find a scroll tool at the far right of the bar. Grab it and drag it back to the left to scan through other addresses, going back to “Foundation of Government,” Jan 15, 1776, by John Adams.
It’s kind of interesting to see references and prominence of education. In the image to the right, Thomas Jefferson evidently made many references to education when he called for a Bill of Rights for the Constitution.
It’s also interesting to see how our vocabulary has changed over the past 235 years.
The first inaugural address by George Washington included these words which I need to look up in a dictionary:
vicissitudes, pecuniary, palliated, predilection, maxims
I KNOW that not every new idea or application we encounter has to be applied to our classroom but…not only is this site cool in and of itself, but it suggests (sorry, I can’t help myself) a lesson turning key literary elements or parts of speech or student blog content into clouds.
“I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now”.
I did a tag cloud on the ‘Gettysburg Address’ using one of the Tag Cloud generators that are available if you Google “Tag Cloud.” As an English teacher, this is an interesting way to look at words and diction in a new way.
Not very intuitive? It’s a dead tagcloud on online tagcloud generators. The only congrats for seaming presidents under 1 slider bar.