by Richard D. Solomon, PhD and Elaine C. Solomon rdsolomonphd@gmail.com

Tuesday, September 11, 2012/24 Elul
The Technology: Tagxedo
 
In previous Technology Tuesday articles, we discussed two word cloud web tools, Wordle and Tagul. This week we present a third word cloud option, Tagxedo. A word cloud, or word collage, is an artful display of words from a selected passage, narrative, or list. The more often a word appears in the selection, the larger it appears in the word cloud. Check out these sample word clouds with Jewish themes.
 
You can use the web tool Tagxedo to create your own word clouds. Simply visit http://www.tagxedo.com/ and follow the steps as described in this tutorial. The image to the right is an example of a Tagxedo word cloud in the shape of an apple made from the text of Babaganewz’s homepage.
 
In Your Classroom
 
Here are some fun ways to use Tagxedo as a project for a unit about Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur:
1.       Choose a High Holidays prayer, such as Kol Nidrei or the shofar service. Use Tagxedo to make a word cloud of the prayer (or have students make it), then post an image of it in your Behrman House Online Learning Center (OLC) classroom for students to see. Discuss as a class or ask students to leave a comment in the comments section of the OLC about the significance of the words that are larger, why they are repeated in the prayer, and so on.
2.       Ask students to post in the OLC a list of their favorite Rosh Hashanah foods, symbols, and memories, then make a word cloud of their answers in the shape of an apple. (You can even print out and laminate the word cloud to send home as a Rosh Hashanah placemat.)
3.       After a pre-High Holidays lesson about teshuvah and becoming our best selves, make a word cloud of students’ Rosh Hashanah teshuvah resolutions in the shape of a shofar. To do this, find a simple shofar shape online, then use Tagxedo’s “Add Image…” feature, which is free for the time being, to upload it.
 
In addition, students and teachers can use Tagxedo throughout the school year to create word clouds of almost any Jewish text, passage, or list. For example, spice up a Hebrew vocabulary list by turning it into a word cloud or use word clouds as set induction for textual study.