Sunday, September 16, 2012

Tagxedo: A Word Cloud better than Wordle


We are probably all familiar with word clouds. They can help a student understand a theme, help a student show understanding, or provide an image describing a topic. A popular word cloud is wordle. This world cloud option allows the user to customize the wordle but only provides one option for presentation: a group of words. So perhaps you want more flexibility and creativity in your world cloud? Well, the answer is Tagxedo. This word cloud option allows the user to customize the words to be used, either by typing them in or entering a URL. The cool part about tagxedo is that the user has a ton of options on how the Tagxedo looks. Tagxedo is a useful, visually pleasing creation tool.
Examples of Use: I have attached an interactive tagxedo to this post from my Stone Age unit, you could provide the student with a link (example here), or post it as an static image only.
Application to Education: student can create a tagxedo about a certain topic and have the overall shape of the word cloud be a central theme. Teachers can create a tagxedo and post it on their website to convey an idea/topic to their students.

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