As back to school session is underway , I love greeting new students with artfully decorated bulletin boards. My favorite way to do so is with Tagxedo’s word cloud maker. To use the Tagxedo site you must have Silverlight (a free Microsoft plug-in) installed on your computer. Silverlight does not work with all browsers. I ended up using Explorer. Once you have cleared this hurdle making word clouds on Tagxedo is very intuitive.
I had a great time playing around with the different shapes, fonts, colors – it is very entertaining and totally free! I finally settled on the traditional apple shape and loaded it with the names of fictional students. Check out tagxedo.com, see my sample below!
[…] I am always looking for fun ways to generate classroom participation. If you can relate to my quest, take a look at AnswerGarden.ch. The site lets you create a word cloud with audience responses in real-time. I am a big fan of word clouds as you know – remember my post on Dreaming of September Bulletin Boards […]