Tagxedo

I have been playing around with www.Tagxedo.com.   We are about to start our poetry unit and I thought it would be a great website to use to allow students to create a shape poem.  I have been playing around with Tagxedo, but I was not able to get the site to allow me to type my poem in their shape so that it still looked like a poem. Even with all of the different options available, I was not able to create a typical shape poem where the words were horizontal and in the order I wrote them. I am still trying to figure out if there is a way to do this that I am not aware of, but I don't think that there is.  You can type your poem into the type text box, but then the tool mixes up the order of your words and scatters them into the space of the shape you picked.

I became very frustrated with Tagxedo to perform the task of creating shape poems, but I think it would be a great tool to use to help students in other ways besides poetry. I think it would be a great tool to use to identify the main idea of an online article or of a story they wrote or are reading.  Once the text of the article or story is uploaded, you can allow for words that are mentioned more often to increase in size.  This would help students be able to use key words to write or tell a summary of the text.

 I think it would also be a useful tool to use at the beginning of a unit to create a list of prior knowledge about a subject or at the end of a unit to allow students to make a list of all of the knowledge they now know about a topic.  I usually create lists on chart paper, but this would be a great tool to use to switch it up.