Happy Tuesday!
This week's tech tip is sort of a piece of 'word cloudesque' art.
By the way, if you haven't checked out the cool word cloud in the front hall, I used Tagxedo to make it. I started with a rectangle (the shape that I wanted the final picture to be) and then fiddled with all of the adjustments to get it to be what I wanted it to be. I think Tagxedo works better for this type of application.
The American Heritage Dictionary has a site called: You Are Your Words.
On this site, you create beautiful word portraits. I've seen this effect created in Photoshop, but it takes a long time and lots and lots of patience to master. So, when I saw one of these word cloudesque creations, I wanted to know how it was done.
It's really simple:
1. Choose a photograph or use your web cam to take one.
2. Do you recognize subject? You will need to use the scale and move tools to get the eyes and mouth in the cross hairs. I tried one without having the eyes and mouth in the recommended areas and it still worked out, but it took some additional tweaking in step three.
3. Add your words. You can, if you have them, connect to your Facebook or Twitter account. Or, like me, you can just write some new text.
Here is the text I put into the generator: Dr. Ryan became the Principal of Hubbard Woods School in July 2012. It was not his first time at Hubbard Woods however. He had been a teacher at Hubbard Woods School over twenty years ago. It is with open arms that the community has welcomed him. His first year was a tremendous success and the community looks forward to many fantastic years to come. Dr. Ryan's path back to Hubbard Woods took him to three different schools. He was a Principal in Hinsdale for a while. He was also the Principal of The Baker Demonstration School in Evanston, IL. Lastly, he created and nurtured his own school, The Children's School in Oak Park, IL. We are grateful to have his outstanding leadership in our district.
4. Tweaking: You can adjust the font, color and contrast to your liking. Here is where I decided to stop tweaking.
Here is my final result:
There you have it!
Here is a video of how to use this tool also.
Now, how might you use this in your classroom? One thought that comes to mind right away would be the bio-poem. Kids could create text about themselves and then plug it in to this web application. I can imagine that this would be a really cool way to personalize cubbies and portfolio journals and binders. If you were doing a famous person's biography you could copy and past your whole report into the You Are Your Words site and create a very interesting infographic on the person. Similarly you could do a Google search on the person and copy and paste the search into the text field.
How do you think you might use this tool? As always, please be sure to leave your suggestions on the T4 Blog so that we can all benefit from your suggestions!
Thanks,
Todd
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