Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Career Change: Tagxedo Your Students!

Ouch, that sounds painful.  

Yesterday, I stumbled across a pretty cool website - Tagxedo!  Tagxedo "turns words -- famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters -- into a visually stunning word cloud, words individually sized appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurrence within the body of text."  It's simple enough. You can either type the words directly, pick a text file on your computer, or choose a website, then choose your colors, your pattern and font, and voila - you have your Tagxedo!  The photo (right) is the Tagxedo of this very blog.  Pretty amazing.

This is a really neat website which I intend to use with my students' writings by creating their very own Tagxedo with their own words. My plan is to start with the "first day student survey" and create a Tagxedo with for each student with their name, favorite hobbies, books, sport, music, etc.  How fun will that be for my kids?!  There are lots of interesting shapes and colors to choose from so each student can have their own special individualized Tagxedo. I figure I can do this throughout the year with different assignments.

I decided to play around a bit and did a Tagxedo of a section of my favorite book, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.  The Tagxedo is of my favorite chapter - Chapter 59 (below). Yeah, I know I'm a sap using the heart shape. But I just adore this website and can't wait to use it with my kids in the fall. Fellow teachers, something to try with your kids!

On another note: it's official. I've been unhired from my placement in Revere.  Fingers crossed, everyone, that TFA actually finds me an ELA placement north of Boston.  That would be my ideal position.

4 comments:

Lee said...

Thanks for sharing... definately going to use it!! ♥

Sandi said...

It's really fun. I can't wait to use it in the classroom.

Lee said...

I just created my first Tagxedo for my wedding anniversary which is Sunday. I used our wedding song. I hope it'll be a nice surprise for Paul. :-)

Sandi said...

Awwwwww, that's so sweet! Great idea. (Happy anniversary, my friend.)