On Thursday afternoon 6 February at 3.30pm we held our first SchoolNet webinar for 2014. This was a two part webinar presented by Fiona Beal of SchoolNet and the recordings have been separated as follows:
1) Poetry sites you’ll love…
2) Create shapely word clouds with your class using Tagxedo

Webinar Part 1: Poetry sites you’ll love

Title: Poetry sites you’ll love…

A sub-title for this webinar could be ‘Encouraging poetry writing using free online interactives and websites ‘ 

Summary of webinar

The Internet has so many wonderful poetry-writing ideas that your students will love using. Read Write Think has a great selection of useful interactive templates such as Diamante poems, Acrostic poems, Haiku poems, Shape poems, and Found word poems among others. Apart from that your students will quickly pick up useful poetry structures from other useful website interactives. Use Microsoft PowerPoint or Microsoft StoryMaker 3 to display poems. The writers in your class will enjoy discovering their poetry skills using these sites.

The webinar presentation on Slideshare

Here is the presentation which is freely downloadable via SchoolNet’s Slideshare.

Poetry sites you’ll love… from Schoolnet SA

The webinar recording for ‘Poetry sites you’ll love ‘
If you missed the webinar you can listen to the webinar recording here is the link and the video:

Webinar Part 2: Get your class creating shapely word clouds using Tagxedo

Title: Get your class creating shapely word clouds using Tagxedo

Summary of webinar

I love using word clouds in the classroom, especially using Tagxedo (which is free).Tagxedo turns words from wherever – e.g. poetry, famous speeches, news articles, slogans, class writing, and even spelling and vocabulary exercises – into a visually stunning word cloud where you choose the shape. No sign in required, custom shapes and themes, powerful layout engine (very nice shape hugging), and lots of fonts to choose from. Most importantly, the application allows the user to save their created word clouds as PNG, JPG, and IMGUR image files.  It also saves a History View (allowing user to see all “versions” and pick the one they like). If you don’t already use Tagxedo – you are in for a treat.

The webinar presentation on Slideshare
Here is the presentation which is freely downloadable via SchoolNet’s Slideshare.

Get your class creating shapely word clouds using Tagxedo from Schoolnet SA

The webinar recording 

If you missed the webinar you can listen to the webinar recording here is the link and the video:

SchoolNet’s webinars are presented every Thursday afternoon at 3.30pm  (GMT+2).