Engage Your Audience With An Interactive Word Cloud Generator
Amaze the audience in front of you. Ask a question with a free live and interactive word cloud generator (also referred to as a word collage maker or word bubble generator) and see the responses of your audience live on screen.
See examples of great live word cloud questions, and find how you can use an interactive word cloud generator to create a live word cloud today.
What is a Live Word Cloud?
A word cloud is a great way to visualise data. A live word cloud is a tool you can use with an audience to show the most popular opinions in the room represented as a word cloud!
It’s really just a visual web of 1 or 2-word responses to a question. The more popular a particular response is, the bigger it appears in the word cloud generator.
An Example of a Live Word Cloud:
Here, we asked 23 participants in a virtual meeting the question ‘Which city are you tuning in from?‘
We’ve got 23 one-word responses, with the most popular response being ‘Birmingham’, so it is the biggest word and in the centre.
The next most popular responses are smaller. ‘Aberdeen’, ‘Leeds’, ‘Edinburgh’, ‘Liverpool’ and ‘London’ appear at the same size because all five responses were submitted the same number of times.
9 Questions to Ask Using A Live Word Cloud Generator
Live word cloud generators are one of the most versatile bits of kit in the modern presenter’s toolbox. They can be used with any audience, at the start, middle or end of a session for a range of goals.
What questions can you ask your audience with a live word cloud?
Ice Breakers
As a quick, simple and relatable way to start a team meeting or project kickoff meeting, a live word cloud can be a brilliant tool. It has the ability to break the ice and bring people together via their shared opinions or circumstances.
1. Where are you from?
Ask your participants from where they’re joining from and discuss the most popular answers.
Great for: Online workshops or training sessions.
2. How are you feeling?
Checking to make sure everyone is coping okay, and seeing the general feeling of the room, is a great use for a live interactive word cloud.
Great for: Remote team meetings or classes.
3. Thoughts on the game?
Conversational topics like this can help people relax into a new session and lighten the mood ahead of the real meat of the meeting.
Great for: Team meetings, training sessions or classes.
Voting
While a multiple-choice poll can reveal the most popular result from a setlist, voting via a data cloud is a good way to elicit open responses with no limits. The most popular answer will appear clearly as the largest response.
4. What topic should we go over?
Ask your students or team members to choose which topic they’d like to revisit, or which matter they think is the most urgent.
Giving people the freedom to identify their own weak points can help build important self-analytical skills.
Great for: Team meetings, training or classes.
5. Who nailed their work this week?
This one is part icebreaker, part voting word cloud.
Ask your team who they think has performed well in the past week, then see the most popular members of the team loom large.
Great for: Team building activities, team meetings and classes.
6. Who’s winning the World Cup?
For a bit of preamble in a pub quiz, or just some light-hearted speculation before a team meeting or lesson kicks off, this one is good for jumping on that pre-tournament expectation before England brings it home.
Great for: Quizzes, social events or team meetings.
Quick Tests
Want to check understanding of a topic in a clear and concise way? A live wordle can show you how popular a question’s correct answer is compared to all the others submitted by students or trainees.
7. One right answer
Ask a question with only one right answer.
Its size compared to all the other answers will let you know the general level of understanding in the class or workshop.
Its size compared to all the other answers will let you know the general level of understanding in the class or workshop.
Great for: Quizzes, training sessions or classes.
8. Multiple right answers
Ask a question with multiple right answers.
This way, you can see the level of comprehension of all students or trainees, while congratulating the smaller, more obscure answers.
Ask a question with multiple right answers.
Great for: Quizzes, training sessions or classes.
9. Pointless (Game)
Pointless is a British TV show where the more obscure your answer is, the better you do.
Ask a question and award points to the smallest answer on the board. (Learn how to play it here!)
Pointless is a British TV show where the more obscure your answer is, the better you do.
Great for: Quizzes, training sessions or classes.
Other Ways to Use Word Clouds
Word clouds (also known as word bubbles, tag clouds, data clouds, wordles, word collage makers, and word collages) can display all sorts of data, and they don’t have to be in an interactive format. Here are some additional ideas to fire your imagination.
Frequency
A frequency word cloud is like the live word cloud examples above, with popular results appearing the largest. The difference here is that all data is inputted by the creator of the word cloud, rather than a live audience.
Significance
Aside from showing the popularity of certain words, word clouds can also represent significance in other fields, like size, power, or even sugar content in breakfast cereals.
A well-known version of this is the population word cloud, where place names with a higher population appear larger.
Positive vs Negative Sentiment
These types of clouds use AI to isolate entries depending on whether they have positive and negative sentiments. Words like ‘fantastic’ and ‘awesome’ will appear in the positive cloud, while words like ‘awful’ and ‘bitter’ will appear in the negative one.
Want to make a live word cloud for your classroom or team meeting?
See our comparison of online word cloud generators, or click here to make a live word cloud!
Get any of the above examples as templates. Sign up for free and take what you want from the template library!
Make Your Own Live Word Cloud or Word College
There is no shortage of tools out there for making a great looking live word cloud. You’ll find free generators all over the web, but an interactive word college generator where your audience input the words themselves? That’s a bit rarer.
Comparison of Interactive Word Cloud Generators Online
Below we’ve compared five of the most popular live word cloud generators and word collage makers around. These tools are also known as word bubble generators and word collage makers.
Here’s the lowdown on what each tool offers…
| AhaSlides | Mentimeter | Slido | Poll Everywhere | Kahoot! | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free? | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ |
| Limit per Event | None | 2 | 5 | None | None (with paid account) |
| Settings | Multiple submissions, Profanity filter, Hide submissions, Stop submissions, Time limit. | Multiple submissions, Stop submissions, Hide submissions. | Multiple submissions, Profanity filter, Character limit. | Multiple submissions, Change answer. | Time limit. |
| Customisable Background? | ✅ | Paid only | ❌ | Image and font only for free. | ❌ |
| Customisable Join Code? | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Aesthetics | 4/5 | 4/5 | 2/5 | 4/5 | 3/5 |
Use The Free AhaSlides Live Word Cloud Generator
Here’s how you can make a word collage and set up your live interactive word cloud generator for 100% free.
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Create an AhaSlides account
Click here to make an AhaSlides account for free. Create a presentation with your first interactive word cloud!
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Create a word cloud slide
Click ‘new presentation’ and select ‘Word Cloud’.
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Set up your live word cloud
Write your word cloud question. Customise with any of the 6 settings on the slide.
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Style your live word cloud
In the ‘background’ tab, change the text colour, base colour, background image and overlay.
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Invite participants to join
Share your presentation’s unique QR or join code with your audience. They use their phones to join your live word cloud.
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Watch the responses roll in!
Participants send their entries into your live word cloud, which are updated in real-time on the screen.
Bonus 💡 Try out a word cloud template without signing up! Click here to give AhaSlides’ live word cloud generator a test run, with an audience of up to 7 participants before signing up for a free account.
Live Word Cloud FAQ
Got questions about AhaSlides’ live word cloud? The FAQ below answers the most common queries. Click the blue button in the bottom-right corner to live chat with one of our team!
Is there a way to filter audience responses in my word cloud?
1. Profanity filter – Applying the ‘profanity filter’ as a setting on the word cloud means that you can block English-language swear words from being inputted by your audience. The filter will replace the blocked words with asterisks (*) – you can read more about the profanity filter here.
2. Manually delete entries – If there are audience responses that you do not want to show, you can manually delete them after they’re submitted. Simply hover over the word that you want to delete and click it.
Can I style my live word cloud?
If you subscribe to a paid plan, you can even add audio to your cloud that plays while your audience is responding.
Can I add a time limit for audience responses?
Can I save and reuse my live word collage?
You can read more about erasing audience responses here.
Can people submit responses when I’m not there?
Is there a limit on how many people can submit entries?
If you need to host a tag cloud for more than 7 live participants, please check out our pricing plans.
Can I create a live word cloud in PowerPoint?
However, AhaSlides supports full import of PowerPoint presentations, which is available on the free plan. Once imported, you can place interactive slides like word clouds, brainstorms and quizzes directly within your PowerPoint presentation.
Word Cloud Pros and Cons
Here we’ve laid out some of the common pros and cons of using a live word cloud.
| Pros ✅ | Cons ❌ |
| Their simplicity makes them super easy to understand, especially within a Word Cloud PowerPoint in education. | Hard to view every word, especially smaller ones. |
| Words make a stronger emotional impact than other visualised data. | Too much colour and action can be an attack on the senses. |
| They’ve visually vibrant and appealing. | Some factors can influence how viewers perceive the importance of words. |
| Their anonymity is great for encouraging participation. | Small variations in a word are presented as separate results. |
| Great for understanding how much all your students have taken in, and areas they need to improve on. | |
| Allows other participants to see how the rest of the group feels about an issue or topic. | |
| They can be a fun classroom task, a change in activity. |
Other Features
Find out more about using Aha Slides and the different features we offer, suitable for use in your classroom, with your business, or with friends and family such as the wheel spinner. Or, create your own quiz to drive engagement, available to do live anywhere and host for free.
If you have any questions regarding our live interactive world cloud generator or our other features, get in touch with Aha Slides today.
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Get any of the above examples as templates. Sign up for free and take what you want from the template library!
🚀 To the clouds ☁️
I love that students can answer anonymously on AhaSlides, so we do silly poll questions and serious questions. It was great for Zoom learning and also in person!
AhaSlides has helped me a lot in my presentations and with my team. The biggest thing is that I’ve been happy with the interaction between me and my audience
I liked that AhaSlides was easy to use and the options for questions was great. I was able to use it for a virtual retreat and it worked wonders. I loved that I was able to edit my background.
