Wordfoto: a picture worth a thousand words

Wordfoto is an iPhone and iPod app that allows you turn any photograph into a mosaic made up of your chosen words, which can then be used to reinforce words or concepts, not just in language learning, but in a variety of other subjects
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Posted by José Picardo on September 4, 2012

Introducing new vocabulary in an engaging way is one of the greatest challenges for language teachers. Remembering vocabulary is arguably the greatest challenge for language learners. That’s why I’m always on the look out for new and exciting ways to present vocabulary items to students in a memorable way.

Wordfoto is an iPhone and iPod app that allows you turn any photograph into a mosaic made up of your chosen words, which can then be used to reinforce vocabulary learning or other concepts, not just in languages, but in a variety of other subjects. Below are some examples of picture-mosaics I created to introduce the topic Healthy Living to my Year 10 class.

Once you have created your picture-mosaic, you can tweak the colour and fonts further by choosing from some preset themes. Pictures can be saved as .jpg from within the app.

If you don’t own an iPhone or an iPod – or if you don’t fancy spending £1.49 ($1.99) – you could consider Tagxedo, a browser based tool that allows you to achieve similar results for free. For a greater focus on the words, I’ve been using Wordle for years.

What do you think?

José Picardo

José is Head of Modern Foreign Languages at Nottingham High School, a secondary school in England, and is interested in the way technology can be used to enhance and transform teaching and learning. José has been curating Box of Tricks since 2007 and holds a MA in ICT and Education.

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  • sdeckerlote

    I think this looks great. What a shame that some of these some of these awesome iOS apps aren’t also web-based. As you said, there’s Taxcedo and Wordle, but this one is really outstanding! Luckily I have an iPod so I could make some teacher-generated content with this, but I wouldn’t have a feasible way to have my students create their own content.

  • http://profiles.google.com/lopezelenita3 Elena Lopez

    Hello I love this app but I have a quick question Have you figured out how to insert Spanish accents or the letter ñ? Thanks

    • http://www.josepicardo.com José Picardo

      On iPods, iPads and iPhones get accents by pressing the required vowel and holding down the key until a selection of different accents appears. The same works for ñ when you hold down the n. Hope that helps.

  • SEO Jo

    Wow the images look really cool, this app is definitely something worth purchasing :)
    http://www.cblearning.com/

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  • Matt

    On this how do you make everything grey and then you just the only color on there?

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  • Spanish Plans

    Very cool! Thanks for sharing!

  • Lory

    How exactly do you use it?

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  • http://twitter.com/dominic_mcg Dominic McGladdery

    Thanks for this, Jose. There is a similar Android app, Wordcam Pro, which does almost exactly the same thing. It costs around £1.49, I think.

  • Maggie Lukens

    This seems like a great app to use with my junior high students, especially my EL students, to enhance their vocabulary and understanding. I’m excited to learn more about this app! Thanks for sharing!

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