Module D: Teaching Activities Using ICT

This week I examined the teaching resource tagxedo (www.tagxedo.com.) Tagxedo is an interesting website, where students and teachers can create ‘wordclouds.’ ‘Wordclouds’ are images created with key words an example is below. Tagxedo can be used by teachers to highlight important themes, techniques and characters in a text and hand out their own creation to their students. Further to this tagxedo can be used as an educational resource in the classroom. Teachers could ask students to identify key words, highlight various themes in a text, draw attention to characters or certain personality traits of one character and identify important techniques. All of these ensure that a student has developed an understanding of the text and its vital components. This tool appeals to visual learners as students are able to manipulate their cloud to emphasize words they find most important and manipulate colour, shape, font and theme to their liking. Tagxedo also promotes peer work as students can save, share and print their creations. In all tagxedo is an effective tool to highlight basic key points of a variety of texts in a visual manner. Below I have created a ‘wordcloud’ that shows different types of texts secondary students could encounter.