Tagxedo!

I'm pretty much obsessed with technology and always have been.  I remember being the first family on the block to own a home computer and learned DOS, html programming, etc.  Today technology is a huge part of my life and my classroom.

Today I want to post about Tagxedo - one of the most flexible and eclectic tools you can use in your classroom.  For those of you who have not used Tagxedo before, it is a digital word cloud generator where you can totally customize the look of your word cloud.  When you are finished, the word cloud can be printed out or saved to your computer as a picture file.



Tagxedo is much more then a word cloud generator.  You can use it to analyze speeches, create character profiles, brainstorm, create word walls, and so much more!  Here are some Tagxedo word clouds that I or my students have created.

 

This Tagxedo was used and created as a list of brainstormed words for a writing unit on scary stories.  It helped my ELL and struggling readers become confident choosing words they could spell and benefited by gifted students who could use their large vocabularies to help us brainstorm.

  You can use Tagxedo for biographies so many different ways!  

1 - have students make one before you learn about a person as a pre-assessment.

2 - have students create one after the lesson as an assessment.

3 - brainstorm what they know as a KWL

4 - create a word cloud as part of a project

5 - create word clouds and guess what person in history they are describing

6 - differentiate for your gifted kids by having them rank the events in the person's life (notice "Civil War" is the largest 

7 - the list goes on and on!

Copy and paste the text of a speech or story and create a word cloud.  You are easily able to discuss the theme of a story, something that is usually so hard for my 4th graders.  With a word cloud, they can easily pick out the theme because it is visual.

Need more uses for Tagxedo?