Monday, May 7, 2012

Web 2.0 Tools: Wordle vs. Tagxedo

     When I got home from class this afternoon I sat down at my computer and began playing with the Web 2.0 tools posted on our Wiki. Of course I started with Wordle and Tagxedo! I had never used Tagxedo before so I wanted to compare it to Wordle.
     I found that Tagxedo had a wider range of color themes and fonts. It was also easier to decide on what font to use with Tagxedo because each font name was displayed in the font itself. The thing I didn't like about Tagxedo was the difficulty in customizing my design. I was experimenting with a Green Bay Packers theme. On Wordle I was able to get the exact Green Bay colors and 'fixed' the word count so the words I wanted would be the largest. I had high expectations when starting with the Tagxedo website. I thought I would use a football shape or the shape of the United States but the closest thing I could find was an oval; there were the shapes of a soccer ball, Ireland, South America and China but those were of no help. I did see that I could upload my own picture but I didn't want to spend too much time on that part. Once I settled with the oval shape I wanted to pick Packer colors, however, it was much more difficult than I expected. I needed to find color codes for each color I wanted to use and I had to go to a website called ColourLovers to find color pallets.
     Overall, I would say Wordle is a lot more user friendly. If you have the time and skills to figure out how to get the most out of Tagxedo the I would say it would rank far above Wordle because of its awesome final quality.

Here are the two images I ended up making. On Tagxedo, I switched from the oval shape to a heart because the oval was too boring. Enjoy!




5 comments:

  1. I found the United States shape after I posted this! :)

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  2. Wow! I agree Tagxedo image does look a lot better! Yesterday in class when I clicked on Tagxedo to try and play around with it a little, it looked to confusing to even give it a chance, but after seeing this I think I need to go play around with it. I'm kind of surprised that there was no foot ball shape on the site though. You think if they had a soccer shape, they would have a football shape as well. I like the Wordle image as well, and really enjoyed playing with it yesterday in class. It was my first time using the program and had a lot of fun with it. It's something I will use in my future classroom.

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  3. Nicole - This is very cool! I agree with Kristin, it looked very difficult when I was looking around on it yesterday. I think Wordle would be more user friendly for young students. It would be neat to have students do this at the beginning of the year to introduce themselves to the rest of the class!

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  4. I also agree that while the Tagxedo image looks better, it is definitely more complex seeming, and I think it would probably be easier for elementary students, particularly younger students, to use Wordle. Thanks for trying those both out and showing your results-cool!

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  5. Thanks for trying this out! I hope to provide a lot of resources in this class, but we won't have enough time to explore all of them in class. Do what you are doing - just take time to play and explore. That's how we learn!

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