Tagxedo

Created with Tagxedo

Same words, different shapes

Do you remember my post on Wordle? If not, click here. Well, Tagxedo is another Website for generating word clouds. According to the site, "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 is super simple to use and there is no need for a username and password. For instance, I typed in the URL to this blog, and this is what Tagxedo generated. You can choose the font, theme, colors, orientation, and layout. You can also constrain the word cloud to selected shapes. The callout in the first photo is the same word cloud as the apple below, but in a different shape. You can save, print and share these word clouds in multiple formats. Ms. Sirof recently shared this tool at an English Department Meeting. She said that one classroom application for Tagxedo is to have students copy and paste his/her essays into Tagxedo to see which words the students use most often. Students can then go to a thesaurus to find synonyms for over used words in his/her writing.