Tag Galaxy!

Today, I discovered Tag Galaxy, an educational blog. The site was created by a student named Steven Wood for his 2008 diploma thesis project. I decided that it was valuable enough to be on my blog as I spent an hour going through the site and found it very interesting.

As you enter the blog, you are asked to “enter initial tag”; this could be anything that you want. For example blue, mining and school. The site is simple and easy to use regardless of age. I found that Tag Galaxy could be used within schools to enable children to see the different aspects of a word that could mean one thing to them.

I enjoyed exploring different words, and I found that I did learn something new. This amazed me as I thought it would be another educational site for children. However, as I began going through the site and exploring any tags that came to mind, an hour had gone already.

Below is a video from YouTube which is a brief outline of what Tag Galaxy is:

Why do I find the site so valuable?

Instead of using text to tell me about the tag, it uses a variety of pictures from everywhere. This makes the site more interesting as I didn't get bored. It came to the point that I wanted to look at more tags as I was becoming more and more interested each time. Using images rather than text can entice children to learn as they become fascinated with the images that they are seeing. If you prefer to learn visually, then this site would be perfect for you.

Once you enter a tag, you will come to a page with a big planet in the middle (which is your main word), and then little planets going around it with other words which are linked to it. This means that you could explore the little planets as well as the main one to help with your research. Here is an example of one I did earlier:

I decided to explore landscape and sea, and this brought me to a new screen. In the middle of the screen there is a big planet again, but this time it is surrounded in different pictures of what I researched. Below is a screenshot of the result:

I recommend this site to anyone who would rather learn through images as images speak a thousand words.