Monday, 12 April 2010

Post IATEFL Blues

What will I do with myself from now on? The last four days have been action-packed with exciting virtual events from Harrogate. I have virtually had the time of my life and it has been absolutely wonderful. The Online Forums will be open for quite a while if anybody would like to continue posting comments and sharing ideas here. I have used Twitter more than ever before and it's been quite a revelation for me!

You might also like to read "Let us Now Praise Famous Women" on Nik Peachey's Quick Shout blog and IATEFL and Tweet-ups on Ozge Karaoglu's blog.

The Colourful World of Tagxedo

Image above generated by www.tagxedo.com

I read about this new tool called tagxedo via my Twitter stream from Free Technology for Teachers and being ever curious, I had a little go with it yesterday. I downloaded a plug-in called Silverlight and then I simply typed in the URL to my blog in the Create section and hey presto, the lovely shape above was generated. It is still in Beta form, so the words don't move around yet as they do on the official tagxedo website. I sent Russell Stannard from Teacher Training Videos a DM tweet asking him if he could make a video on tagxedo, and the answer was almost immediate. Within a short time he sent me a link to a video tutorial which will be available on his site very soon. Absolutely amazing!

I also read this very interesting post by Eva Buyuksimkesyan on her delightful blog A Journey in TEFL which included a lovely tagxedo cloud.

Can you guess what the tagxedo below is about?
Do you think tagxedo will replace Wordle as a teaching tool? I'd love to hear what you think.

www.tagxedo.com

5 comments:

Martin Sketchley said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Martin Sketchley said...

Interesting development for Wordle but I think Wordle is here to stay for classroom use.

Adam said...

Imagine how I feel after the conference, I come from Harrogate! Doubly blue.

Janet Bianchini said...

Hi Martin

Thank you for dropping by here.I agree with you about Wordle. It's definitely here to stay as it is so popular with teachers all over the world right now. I wonder, though, if tagxedo with it's more interactive app(when it gets going)might not just have a bit more of an advantage?

Janet

Janet Bianchini said...

Hi Adam

Thank you for taking the time to visit my blog. I can well imagine how blue you must be feeling after such an amazing conference experience. Everything I have read so far from fellow bloggers and tweeters has been highly complimentary.

I enjoyed looking through the posts outlining all your experiences at IATEFL Harrogate and all the lovely photos.

Maybe just maybe next year, I might like to try to present at Brighton IATEFL. Your excellent tips on how to present at conferences would be very useful indeed! Please note the use of the word "might". It's just a thought at the moment, but who knows where thoughts could lead to?

Janet