Cool Tools for you #4

Cool Tool for this week I choose to do Word Tagul Clouds.  This is a word association Tool, that takes a list of words of your choosing and combines them into one shape.

 For my creation I just incorporated four words that had to do with this class, I used Educational Technology, Major Project, Flip-book, and Moving Animation.  I chose just four words to keep it simple.  Once you choose the words you want to work with you can choose different colors for each words, fonts, angles, and even size.  Once you have all the words you select a shape that you want your words to take the form of.  Last step is to import the words and make it animated.  In this Tool, you can actually make the words Animated, one you have created the animation you can go over each word and it will get highlighted in which you can then click on it to go to another web page.  Once you have created your word animation you can then download and share what you have created, or you can print it on to a t-shirt or other things.

As a teacher this would be a good source of technology to incorporate with any word based lesson.  For the classroom this would be good to use for getting kids to associate vocabulary words with each other and even definitions.  Because you can actually incorporate a link to each of the words it could also be beneficial for things other then just vocabulary words.  In association with words, you could put in different dates, people, theories, etc.  and then have them all connect to each other and also some outside source.  This would be a very cool to use with any subject since you can incorporate almost any different background to the words.

For teaching it would be interesting to have in order to keep your students engaged, by having them pull the cloud up on a computer and use it for worksheets or research for homework or a project.  Because it is a word association tool, if put together well then it could be a good source for students to use to study with.  In order to be a good study tool tho, the teacher must be well versed in their subject matter to have all the necessary aspects in the cloud.

As a teacher there are many ways to help kids learn and even study.  Tagul Clouds would be a good way to have students use what they know and make a cloud to show that they understand the connection between certain words and definitions, dates and events, or even person and what they did.  As a teacher it would be a good way to have students use it to present what they know to the class as a study for them.  It is an easy way to get students to be engaged in the way they should be learning and making connections to material.

Go to Word Tagul Clouds to start your own now!