Ideas for Using AASL Best Websites: Tagxedo January 27, 2012
Posted by hmlang in Best Websites for Teaching and Learning, Committees.trackback
In this blog entry Cathy and I are going to talk about using Tagxedo in your school. This site won in the most recent 2011 list and has been a presentation favorite since it was announced. If you have never used Tagxedo, this site is a word cloud generator. But the website takes word clouds to a whole new level. Tagxedo lets users create shapes out of their word clouds. Use the shapes that Tagxedo has available or load your own art or pictures and create the clouds from those. The site is completely free and very addictive once you start trying it.
Tagxedo can be used to create designs of all types. It can be used for conference logos, to create t-shirt designs, or posters. Students can create a tag of themselves. Import a close cropped headshot of a student and they can create a Tagxedo of words that describe their personality, or their favorite books, likes, dislikes, and more. Tagxedo can be incorporated into school art contests as well. This site can be used for a vocabulary introduction activity and it can help students gain familiarity with unknown words.
This website is perfect for differentiation of instruction. Students who are visual learners can express their work through word images. Tagxedo can be the unwritten research paper, a detailed representation of library investigation and work. Those students who have difficulty writing out long passages can use this site to explain their work graphically. The images from Tagxedo can be embedded into Power Points and other media. Instead of bullet points on a slide, a word cloud can do the job instead.
Assigning a Tagxedo as a way to demonstrate concept mastery does not eliminate the need to for background research or reading about a topic to develop a word cloud. On the contrary, students have to dig deeper in their thinking when they are visualizing how to represent their research or findings in a graphic format through a word cloud.
Tagxedo is a site that the AASL Best Websites Committee for Teaching and Learning highly recommends. It is a site that many of the committee members use personally and recommend to their students and faculty. The Tagxedo website offers 101 ways to use their word clouds. Copying and pasting images is very easy. It is a very user-friendly, intuitive site that we feel your students and you will enjoy.
Heather Moorefield-Lang (Committee Chair) and Cathy Jo Nelson (Committee Member)
This was very helpful – I look forward to playing with this website but the post would have been more helpful if you had actually linked the site (saving me a search) as well as linked to some examples. Thanks!