I was at a training last week that highlighted different Gifted and Talented strategies for classroom teachers to use in their classrooms and Tag Galaxy has become my new best friend. Like many teachers, we knew that anytime you can tie pictures to words even the simple ones, students are more likely to make meaning and connect it to themselves. Plus, to  move words from short term to long term memory students have to build personal relevance with the words. Pictures do that. I have for the longest time used Google Images to do this. But Tag Galaxy is even better than that.

 First when you put in any word, Tag Galaxy creates a sun and satellites. You will want to stick with the sun. the satellites are smaller pictures that tie to your word search but they are not as effective at getting at what you are looking for.



In my search, I used Italian Greyhound. the sun is all the pictures out there and the satellites are everything from dog, puppy, sight hounds, and Italian. If you click on the sun, it will enlarge and you can surf the sun for the picture you are looking for. (Like with all picture searches, I would go out first and make sure that they are clean if you have students using it.)




Once you pick a picture, it will take you to the original picture source. You cannot save from the Sun or print.

Going back to the G/T presentation and what you could do with students--I have a group of 5th graders that I could see using this to pull pictures for their weekly spelling words instead of me doing it or having them draw the pictures. I have always tried to find ways for my students build their own personal relevance with words.  Not only to help their reading and writing but to increase their own vocabularies so they have a greater background knowledge to pull from.

Until next time.