Tagxedo

[Kelly Farrow]

Hello! Is anyone out there using Tagxedo? My kids already use Wordle and love it; Tagxedo really takes that idea and ramps it up. I have some Q's about it, though. If you look at their gallery, you'll see words formed into images of people's faces. When I looked at their FAQ of how to do that, it says you just click on the "Add image" button. I've gone to the "create" page several times to try to do this myself, looking for anything about images or adding images and don't see it anywhere!! What am I missing? I have visions of cool projects of poetry formed into an image of the kids' faces... Hope we can get to that dream! Any other awesome ideas w/ Tagxedo would be much appreciated.

Attached is one I made from all my tweets!!

[Shirley Miller]

Hi Kelly, I don't use Tagxedo, but one of my students figured out how to put an image on a wordle using microsoft word. Then he made a podcast (at my request) to explain how to do this. If you'd like the url for the podcast let me know.

[Cynthia Sinsap]

Share the URL for the podcast here, if you would, Shirley. I'd be interested in it, and I think others would be too. Tagxedo uses Microsoft Silverlight, which most of my school computers, as well as my students' computers, don't have. But all of them have Word and flash.

[Shirley Miller]

I had the same issues with programs my students had access to. The internet and Word was about all they had.

Actually, this address will download the directions to your computer as an mp4. You will need to turn the volume on your computer WAY up to hear the directions, however, there are screen shots to go with all the verbal directions.

How To Add Images to Wordle

[Cynthia Sinsap]

Thanks so much Shirley!
Hope you don't mind, I looked around your website a bit. I noticed some great Animoto projects done. Am I correct in assuming you have the paid subscription to Animoto? Back when I was looking at Animoto as a tool for illuminated poetry, I could only get 30 second films under the free membership. Even Sandburg's "Fog" felt rushed with only 30 sec!
Your pb wiki has a nice crisp appearance. I have wikispaces, but haven't used it for many classes yet. Last year I had Ning's for most of my subjects and we loved them. I was so disappointed to have Ning go to paid only! Noticed you were playing with the idea of Edmodo-- have you tried that yet?
I want something that I or students can upload music, files, presentations, video clips, something with a blog type function for journals and posting assignments and info, a discussion board, and if students could sort themselves into groups to communicate and share info for project/collaborative work, that would be perfect. I think it might be that I want my site to do too much. I ran 2 of my classes on Edublogs and it worked well for posting information, handouts, and keeping them up to date, but it's just not interactive enough. Welcome any tips you have!

[Patrick Flynn]

I use this all the time as a summerizing tool or an advanced organizer. I am a math teacher. What I do is look-up in wikipedia the topic I am teaching, copy all the text there and put it into Wordle or now Tagzedo. We then discuss the picture along with the relative frequences (size) of the words. It shows what ords re more mportant than others. If I was an english teacher, I would download the PDF of a book the students just read and do the same thing. What rich discussions those would be!

[Hardy Leung]

This is Hardy Leung, creator of Tagxedo.  First of all please make sure you have Microsoft Silverlight installed.  I assume you do?  The best way to find out is if you enter an URL (e.g. www.cnn.com) and hit enter.  After a few seconds you should see a tag cloud.

The "Add Image" capability is under "Shape".  Click the right arrow, and then at the bottom of the menu there is the "Add Image" button.

I hope you'd be able to use Tagxedo and have fun with it.  Thanks!

-- Hardy Leung

[Patrick Flynn]

Hardy,
Excellent program! My hat's off to you for placing it in the public domain....

[Kelly Farrow]

Thanks to everyone! Hardy, you do some amazing work. I'll try out everyone's ideas and listen to the podcast and see what shakes loose. :)

[Susan Stephenson, the Book Chook]

I love Tagxedo too, but before it appeared, I figured out how to add pictures to Wordle. You can see a sample on my blog. When several people emailed me and asked how to do it, I put up my method in another blog post. I did it with Photoshop Elements, and it was honestly easy to do, otherwise I wouldn't have managed!

[Shirley Miller]

The computers on our cart don't have photo shop or paint or any of those type programs. Most computers do have word, though. Thanks for sharing.