Cool Iris

Cooliris is a media browser plug-in for your favorite web browser. It provides interactive full-screen slideshows of online images. The plugin is available for Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer and installs easily. Once installed, it is a small icon on the command bar of your browser.

After you enter your search request you will be presented with a wall of images. Wow!

At present, the software is compatible with Bing Images, Google Image Search, Yahoo! Image Search, Ask.com Images, AOL Image Search, Flickr, Photobucket, Corbis, Picasa, Fotki, FotoTime, deviantART, SmugMug, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, hi5, Friendster, YouTube (for videos), Gallery, Craigslist, Amazon.com, and any web site that implements mediaRSS "link" tags in their HTML pages. The software places a small icon in the corner of an image thumbnail when the mouse moves over it, which launches into a full-screen photo viewer when clicked.

Tag Galexy

This first two links I sent you deal with Tag Clouds. These programs generated tags based on frequency of the words in a body of text. Keeping with the theme of tags, today's link is .


When you first go to Tag Galaxy, you will be asked to enter the "tag" for which you are searching. I used photosynthesis.


The site then searches Flickr (a photo posting site) for tags that match your search request. It also searches for related tags, which appear as moons or planets in the galaxy.


When you click on the sun, your pictures load. You can spin the sun, using your curser. If you click on a picture it will zoom in on it. If you click a second time, the photographer's name and notes will appear, if they included that information.

Besides the wow factor, it could be a good device to get a discussion or journaling started at the beginning of class. The person who demonstrated this at the METC was a language teacher who used the photos to get his students to describe what they were seeing.

Tagxedo

Here is another tag cloud generator, but with style. http://www.tagxedo.com/. The user interface is a bit more complicated than Wordle, but it shapes the tag cloud. Here is an example of Lincoln's first inaugural address. The site is still in Beta (testing) so you can even add your own images. Can't think of ways to use it: here are 101 ways for you to consider (just copy the following into your browser address bar): https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=0AQuLVd7HRkD_ZG4ycmdtOV8zaGRjZG1wZDQ&hl=en  

 

Wordle

Wordle
Most of you have seen Wordle and perhaps have used it in your classrooms. Wordle generates “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.

For example, if you cut and paste the words from the Declaration of Independence into Wordle you would get this:



Instantly, your students can see what was on the minds of the writers. Other applications could be purely graphic backgrounds for posters, postcards or the like. You can remove words by right-clicking the word, if necessary. You can print these easily. To get a digital copy, press print screen and then paste into a program like PAINT, which most computers have. Select the Wordle, then cut and paste into a new paint document.

http://www.wordle.net/