Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Tagul

      Sharing my experiences with the web "surfers" are meant to enhance collaboration with my colleagues by interchanging  ideas and tips. The digital world offers numerous opportunities for educators to go digital . Amongst these tools, I mention Tagul the gorgeous Tag cloud.(http://tagul.com/)
   It is true that at first, I had a fleeting glipmse, and was fascinated by the shapes, the colours of this tool. But soon a myriad of questions started to insist on the "teacher" in me. How can we benefit from Tagul in our classrooms and make our pupils enjoy this tool as much or even more than I enjoyed it myself? How can Tagul be useful to our pupils?
    What is crystal clear is that this tool can be used to help learners document their vocabulary lists, by classifying them into synonyms, opposites and arrange them accordingly in their portfolios. In my humblest opinion, creating these lists artistically would help learners memorise them easily.Furthermore, it would boost the learners' creativity especially when they start sharing them with their classmates. Such a wonderful tool might urge the learners to think of more possible ways to sum up lessons in this artistic way! What if learners summed up their lessons using Tagul ?
    What if the teachers used these wonderful word clouds to brainstorm a topic or predict what could possibly be the topic of today's class? 
      By and large,Tagul  is a creative and an empowering tool , for it is not that complicated. In the end, when looking at their word clouds, learners would feel a real feather in their cap to be as creative as such! 
Below are some of my attempts as a teacher, but I will soon be posting some of my pupils' own creative word clouds.


Get Adobe Flash player

Get Adobe Flash player


   Below,  is the first wonderful cloud creatively shared by one of my pupils: Cyrine. She amazingly made a cloud about the activities of Holidaying , which is part and parcel of the syllabus. 
Here is the second one presented by Cyrine, which sums up the brainstorming activity of this creative pupil. She wonderfully added nearly most of the important words related to Travel.