Take a snapshot of your screen

Creating online snapshots is getting more important as we work online and want to save images of the processes to document or explain things. So: What do you use to make screenshots?

With Microsoft Windows, you press the Print Screen button.

I use Mac, and my favorite tool is the incredibly versatile Skitch that lets you annotate and resize pictures (tutorial). The most amazing bit: You simply drag and drop an image into an email. That has come in handy. I've also used it to prepare several of the images on this blog.

I often use it to take snapshots of Wordle and Tagxedo wordclouds. They're great to project on the wall for

• predicting
• remembering
• highlighting and developing
  
• spinning off new discussions
  
• spelling
• leading into vocabulary work (collocations, Visual Thessaurus)
  

Sometimes these wordclouds don't embed properly. I just saw, for instance, in Wordle that there were page breaks that kept the Wordle code from embedding when I copied and pasted it (see picture). To embed in HTML, you have to delete those empty spaces around the line breaks:





In Tagxedo, a "shapely" app, every word in the cloud is a hyperlink. The sophisticated software driving all of that means it doesn't work on some sites, like the Drupal site Spotlight runs on. If you don't really need all those hyperlinks but like the pretty image, you can take a screenshot and just link the image you have captured back to the original page (add the image, then in the rich text editor highlight the picture, click on the link symbol, copy in the original URL):

Using Wordle

Hi all,

I've taken up John and Anne's call to contribute and help make this a teacher's site by teachers for teachers. This is my first ever entry to a blog so please go easy on me if it doesn't work out quite as planned. Hopefully the ease I have with making this entry will encourage more of you to do the same.

http://www.wordle.net/ is a great online application for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

You can use them to highlight key points from a given topic, such as this one on Presentations:

You can also create "wordles" of phrases by adding " ~ " between each word you input, such as this one for telephoning phrases:

I recently got my students to create their own word clouds on telephoning phrases for homework. Not surprisingly, they all did it!

You can also create a word cloud of an entire website. The higher the frequency of words on the site the larger they will appear in the word cloud. Here's one I just made by inputting the url of this blog:

Once you've created your word cloud, choose the print option and then save it to your computer as a pdf file before printing. This way you'll have the file saved locally and can then email it to your students, print it out or bring it to class on a laptop / USB stick (if you have such facilities to teach with). They're really great fun and really easy to make.

Have fun!