Our fourth grade students were writing about a special event that had happened in their lifetime and the fourth grade team asked me for an idea to integrate technology into the lesson in a unique way. I thought about it and I envisioned the students' special story residing in their mind and I though that words floating around in their heads would be interesting. But, to make it personal, a silhouette rather than just a head would make each student instantly recognizable. So, we decided to created Tagxedo word cloud images from each student's silhouette. Each student would pull in the most important, visual worlds from their memoir that would tell their story. Here are some of our projects:
The most difficult part is creating the silhouettes for Tagxedo. I started with photo images of the students taken against a plain, white paper background. I then edited them in Corel to remove all detail by removing the background and removing all brightness until just a silhouette remained. For those less technical, I would suggest tracing the students silhouette on black paper and simply taking a photo of the black paper to upload to Tagxedo.
