Word Clouds

Today we further explored word clouds.  There are so many different websites devoted just to word clouds!  I think my favorite sites are wordle, tagxedo, and imagechef.  Those are just the website I had the most fun on.  On my wiki page, I posted some of the word clouds I made.  Feel free to check them out by clicking on "wiki page"! Word Clouds are a random assortment of words that are arrange attractively on the page.  You can change the layout, color, and font of most word clouds.  Not only can word clouds be used for fun, but they can also be educational!  For instance, in AP Government, we could enter a some of the constitution into a word cloud website and see what words were used the most or what words were the most dominate throughout the document.  We could do the same with Shakespeare in Comp.  Plus, all the bright colors would do wonders to the drab walls of schools.  Here are some of the word cloud websites...

• Wordle
• Tagul
• Tagxedo
• TagCrowd
• ToCloud
• Text Tag Cloud
• ImageChef
• Worditout
• ABCya Word Clouds

Here is a word cloud I made from this post!

Social Media Wordle

Here is my Social Media Wordle.  It was made on wordle.  On Wordle,  you just enter as many words as you want.  The more times you repeat a word, the bigger it will be in the final product.  It is very fun!

Word Clouds: ImageChef

Today we explored ImageChef.  For the record, I absolutely LOVE LOVE LOVE word clouds.  ImageChef was by far one of the most entertaining of all of the word cloud websites I have been to.  There are tons of options that you can do.  You can make a word mosaic, which is like most of the other word cloud websites like wordle or tagxedo (Check my Glee word mosaic out on the side of my page!).  However, you can also do tons of other things, like make banners (like the one at the top of my blog), send e-cards, or other cool activities like that.  I plan to explore ImageChef more on my own at home.  Click the picture to go to ImageChef!

Social Bookmarking: Diigo

Diigo is the third Social Bookmarking site that we learned about.  Diigo is another bookmarking site.  It is just as easy to bookmark with Diigo as it is to bookmark with Delicious.  However, on Diigo, you can highlight certain portions of a webpage about a topic instead of bookmarking a whole page.  I used this website the other day when I was writing a case brief for AP Government.  It was very helpful to just highlight the portions of the information that I needed.  This is definately one of the better bookmarking sites.  Click on the picture to visit Diigo.com!

Social Bookmarking: Symbaloo

Symbaloo is one form of Social Bookmarking. With Symbaloo, your bookmarks are in the form of little blocks.  Once you click on a block, you are transported to the website that you bookmarked.  I like Symbaloo, but there are some downsides to it.  For one, you have to go in and make a block personally, not just by bookmarking a page. I also don't really like that Symbaloo makes their own webmixes.  I don't like webmixes because they bring up a different page that has a whole bunch of different news, shopping, or weather blocks.  From there, you can click on the block to see more about it.

However, I have all the possible scholarships that I can earn saved on a different page of my symbaloo account for easy access. To get to symbaloo, click on the picture.

Social Bookmarking: Delicious

 

Delicious is one website used for social bookmarking. On Delicious, you can use the "add-on" buttons (as shown on the left) to bookmark any page with just one click of a button!  Once a page is bookmarked, you can tag it with different keywords to be able to find it later.  One neat thing about Delicious is that instead of using a search engine like google, you could use Delicious to do your searching.  However, instead of anything coming up, just other users bookmarks would show up.  This would be beneficial because you wouldn't have to sort through all the "bad" things; only the websites worth looking up would show up!  That is probably the thing I like the most about Delicious.  Click on the picture to take you to delicious.com!

Other Virtual Worlds: Small Worlds

Today I explored Small Worlds.  Small Worlds is another virtual world, similar to Meez.  However, on Small World, the actual world is a lot more complex.  On Small Worlds, everything you want to purchase costs "money", unlike Meez.  However, you can earn coins by playing games.  There are also a lot of places to hang out and interact.  And of course, you can chat.

 My avatar is the one in the orange shirt and jeans.

Social Bookmarking

Today we learned about Social Bookmarking.  Social Bookmarking is the act of saving a webpage (just like regular bookmarking) but you can access your bookmarks from anywhere because they are on the internet!  For instance, if you were researching a topic for English at home, you could save your bookmarks to a social bookmarking site and continue working on  your project at school during your free time.  Plus, social bookmarking would also come in handy if your computer crashed -- if you saved your bookmarks to a website instead of your computer, you would still have all of them!  The really cool thing about Social Bookmarking is tagging.  Once you add a bookmark, you can tag key words that will help you remember what the bookmark was about later on. 
Some popular social bookmarking sites are:

• symbaloo
• delicious
• diigo

I have started my own social bookmarking page to keep track of the many different scholarships that I can apply for as a senior.  It is so much easier to just have them all in one place then having to worry about only working on my home computer.

MeezRoomz

Today on Meez we made rooms and chatted.  In the rooms, you can chat, dance, and sit down and move around.  It is really cool because you could invite people over to your "room" and hang out.  I made my room to look like a living room.  Check out my room! This is a screen shot of my room.  Tommy and Ryan were visiting and being silly.

The only thing that could potentially be bad is that you could meet some strangers on Meez.  But to make sure that you don't, you shouldn't go into one of the public rooms.

Avatars Again...

Yesterday after making my Meez, I went to WeeWorld, another avatar site.  At this site, you get a little person. They are so cute!  There aren't many choices to clothes and stuff, but they are super easy to make.  My Wee person is at the top of the post.

Avatars Again

Today we made avatars again.

This time I went to Meez instead of Voki.  On Meez, your avatar is animated!  That means that you can make them do whatever you want, as long as it's appropriate of course.  And then you can choose it's clothes and whatnot just like any other site.  The only thing that sort of stinks about Meez is that not everything is free.  You have to play their game to get points to earn cooler stuff.  It is really cool how it is animated though.  Plus, it has a lot of choices of clothing, animations, shoes, and accessories.
Here is my Meez: