Literacy Web Tool Modeling

The web tool that I chose to explore more in depth is Tagxedo. This website allows you to create a word cloud about a topic using a website, blog, news article, or search. You simply paste a URL or a word to search in the correct section on the home page and a word cloud is generated. To test this out, I created an "evolution" word cloud using the Wikipedia article on evolution.

With this tool, words that are used most commonly are very big, while less common words are smaller. This is because you would expect more commonly used words to be more important while less common words are not as important.

This tool could help students visually pick out what concepts are most important to a current topic. The ability to pick out the "big picture" concepts is something that many students in my experience struggle with, so this visual could be extremely helpful in supporting this skill.

I would most likely use this tool to help my students explore the big topics in each unit. Students would choose a topic, like evolution, and create a word cloud using Tagxedo. They would then choose several of the larger words in their word cloud to explore more in detail. They would discuss why these words are so important to the topic, what they mean, and how they relate to the topic and the other words in the cloud.

This tool is very simplistic, so there is not a lot of differentiation that can be done with the actual tool. However, in a project like the one I describe above, there are several ways that it can be modified for different students. For instance, an ELL student could create a word cloud in their home language, or choose several of the more prominent words to translate into their home language. A teacher could also modify the number of words that are required to explore to make the assignment more or less challenging for students at different levels of achievement. In addition, there would be a lot of freedom for students to choose topics that interest them and display their exploration using a mode of representation that fits their personality.

The positive aspects of this tool include its simplicity and ease of use. It is very straightforward and would not require much instruction for students to understand how to use it. It also gives you a lot of freedom as to what you want to create a word cloud about. However, it does not have a wide variety of uses, and it doesn't allow for much customization of the words in the cloud.

Overall, I thought this tool was interesting and could pique the interest of my students, but I probably wouldn't use it more than once per school year.