taggalaxy

When I was at the D2L conference in Memphis this past summer, one cool site that was recommended was taggalaxy. Months later, I finally had a little more time to go in and play with it. It is a simple website that allows you to gather published pictures from the web with common tags.

When a person puts a photo onine they have the option to "tag" it which is like a key word or theme. It varies from a caption in that it is usually just one or two words whereas a caption might be a phrase, sentence or even paragraph. Typically you can mark your pictures with more than one tag. When someone else comes onto the web they can look for pictures with certain tags to help them narrow down all the options in order to help them find what he or she is really looking to find.

Taggalaxy allows you to put in the tag you are looking for but the matching pictures materialize into an interactive globe. You can turn and rotate the globe to see the pictures. You can also click on individual photos in order to get more information about it like the full caption. It's just an appealing way to gather and display world wide web photos. I think there's potential there for a couple of my classes.

A downside to this particular program is that I can't seem to find a way to save or export a created globe. So I don't know if I can guarantee that my students would see exactly the same globe if they created it on different computers at different times. It did seem to pull the picures in some form of sequential manner so maybe they would see many of the same pictures. But still I think it is a fun resource.

The website is: www.taggalaxy.com