TagCrowd.com L1 Technology List

This blog entry is about a tool of my own interest from the list of L1 Information Processing Technologies provided by Dr. Wang. I chose to explore the website: TagCrowd This week we discussed the "Learning" aspect of TLC. This tool can be used to achieve the Information Processing aspect of Learning (L1) by breaking complex ideas down into simpler pieces for students.

TagCrowd is a website that can be utilized by classroom teachers and students to identify key words that are important to remember regarding a topic. You begin by inserting text about your subject into a textbox, by either copy and pasting, typing it yourself, using a web page URL, or uploading some sort of file.

For my example I used a website I found educating teachers on phonological and phonemic awareness and copied the URL into TagCrowd (https://www.readingrockets.org/teaching/reading101-course/modules/phonological-and-phonemic-awareness-introduction).

Then I inputted that I wanted my world cloud to include 100 words. TagCrowd suggests using 25-100 words. And I inputted a minimum frequency of "2," meaning that the words in my word cloud most appear at least twice in my original website. You can choose any minimum frequency you would like.

Then there is some simple "yes" or "no" questions to customize your word cloud however you would like. 

And lastly, an important step, is inputting any words you don't want to be included in your word cloud. For example, in mine I picked common words such as "and," "the," and "is," along with some words that were included when I first created my word cloud that I wanted to take out. This is extremely helpful for getting rid of redundant words and helping to customize your final product!

After completing all these steps, TagCrowd created my final word cloud:

Overall, I found this website to be very easy to use. You must have a topic/vocabulary words/story in mind first, and then simply insert your text, whatever it may be, into the textbox. You also can customize the outcome of the word cloud by adjusting frequency and words to not include, to ensure that your final product includes key terms that students need to know.

I also think this tool has a lot of versatility. You can create a word cloud about ANYTHING you want. It is also nice that there is the option to simply input a URL, or to copy and paste your own text. There are endless opportunities with this tool!

And finally, I think the overall likelihood of using this tool in my classroom is somewhat high. I think that this tool is really useful for information processing because it helps break complex ideas into simpler pieces for the brain to process. It also can be used as a repetition/automaticity tool if there are select terms you want students to know without much thought.