Human Brain Cloud

Free!

Human Brain Cloud is a game-based website that uses associations to show relationships between words. To begin, users are presented a word, and they are to type the first word that comes into their head related to that word. After doing so, users can click the word and the association they picked on the right to view its word family as a tree. When viewing it, users can click any other word in the family to grow their tree. As they do, additional words will appear and the word tree will grow. If users wish to start a new word tree, users can tap the “Play” button to receive a new word and begin building a different tree. If users wish to view the association(s) they and others have created based on the words, they can click the “Stats” button. Finally, if users wish to return to the word tree they most recently grew, they can tap the” View” button.

Please Note: Some content on this website is not appropriate for all grade levels. Please use discretion.

Instructional Ideas

1. When learning new vocabulary terms, students can click the “Play” button and type in a vocabulary word. Next, the website will create a word tree with words commonly associated with the one they inputted. That way, students can start to make connections between the new vocabulary word and other words that they may already know.
2. When brainstorming an idea, students can input a word(s) commonly associated with their topic and grow a word tree. Students can then click on the different words in the tree to continue brainstorming, as related to the original topic. In this way, new ideas may come to students as they consider the original idea.
3. To develop students’ reasoning skills, they can make a word association using this website. Then, before viewing the word tree, they can write a short justification that explains why they made that association. Teachers can have students repeat this process for new associations they made as they grow their tree.

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