Adding a Tag Cloud to Your Blog

September 29, 2009 | Leave a Comment

I have been using a search engine called Boolify recently. Boolify is actually a Google Custom Search (see this post for more about this), but it is really useful for teaching children how a search engine works by introducing the concept of Boolean logic. In teaching year 6s at a couple of primary schools this term (Springwood Heath in Liverpool, and Chorlton Park in Manchester) we have been using Boolify to research our topics (local studies at Springwood, and evacuees in WW2 at Chorlton). Here are some more posts on Boolify. However, rather than simply adding a link to the blog sidebar when we find a useful website, I have been teaching the children to use a social bookmarking service called Delicious.

Delicious is a website that I’ve used for a few years now and it’s a fantastic free tool to use at school, either as a staff resource, or as a teaching resource. It’s basically an online collection of your internet favourites (here’s my own as an example), and it’s up to you how you organise it. You’ll see on the right hand side of my Delicious page the “tags” that I have used to organise the links on there. Tagging is simply a way of labelling resources so that they can be easily organised into an index by tag. Once organised by tags the index can be displayed as a “Tag Cloud” with the most popular tags displayed more prominently. By clicking on the tag you will jump straight to the collection of websites indexed with that tag. What’s more, Delicious also tells you how many other people have tagged the website that you have just saved and you can link to them or search tabs across the site making it a great research tool.

This video from Chris Betcher presented at last year’s K12onlineconference explains how tagging can be applied in the real world in all kinds of ways, including photos, documents, blog posts etc. It’s well worth a watch despite being 20 minutes long.

The children very quickly got the hang of tagging – most of them used the keywords that they had used in Boolify as their tags. By looking at the visual display of the tag cloud on the blog, they quickly understood the need for consistency. Initially, for example we had 3 different spellings for Woolton. We are nowhere near a point where the children have got into the mindset whereby they find a useful link and automatically want to tag it on Delicious. I think this will only come with repeated visiting to the site and saving stuff that we’re using in class.

Sorting out a Delicious account for your school and getting staff to start using it is a great way of extending the use of social media beyond your class blog, and over time it will build into an indispensible resource. Once you have started, you will want to display the links as a tag cloud just as Springwood and Chorlton Park have done. Once you have signed up to Delicious, it’s simple:

Click on “Settings” (Top right hand corner)
Under the sub-heading “blogging, click on “Tag rolls”

Change any parameters, such as the title, or colours etc and copy the code in the box at the top of the page. Back on your blog, add a text widget to the sidebar and paste the code into it; save, and you’re done.

Here’s my Delicious links as a tag cloud