What it is: The American Heritage Dictionary has a new webtool that lets students create a self-portrait using their words. Students can link to places where they have already written (Facebook or Twitter) or write something unique specifically for their portrait. The unique image can be shared, saved and printed. You Are Your Words works best in Firefox, Google Chrome, or Safari Internet browsers. I’ve found that pictures with high contrast work better than pictures with similar coloring and low contrast. After you create you image, you can adjust the colors, contrast and font.
How to integrate You Are Your Words into the classroom: You Are Your Words would be a great getting-to-know-you activity. It would give students a neat way to share who they are with the class. At the beginning of the year, a You Are Your Words bulletin board or classroom display would be a fun way for everyone to get to know each other. This site could lead to really interesting discussions about the power that our words have, what they reveal about us, and how they impact people’s perception of us.
You Are Your Words would also be a great way for students to create a mini biography about a hero, person of interest, historical figure, etc. Students could upload a picture and include famous quotes or words that describe the person. These could be used as part of a larger project, or as an independent research project. The site asks where the eyes and mouth of the picture are, so uploading another image or diagram to describe might not work.
Students can create character description cards with words, quotes and phrases that describe fictional characters in the reading they are doing. If you have a class or small group that is reading the same book, each student can choose a character to do this for. Create “trading cards” of the characters that students can create and share with each other so that each student has a card for each character in the book. If students are doing an author study, they could create a “You Are Your Words” about the author.
As students are learning about different roles within government, they could create a You Are Your Words image about each position using a picture of the person who holds that position in government. The writing could be related to the job description of the position.
The picture above is an example of a You Are Your Words image that I created with the words from this post!
Tips: If you have an iDevice, the Word Foto app works very similarly and lets you use ANY picture. This allows students to define vocabulary words with pictures.
Please leave a comment and share how you are using You Are Your Words in your classroom!
What a great post. Thank you for the resource, but more importantly – the ideas for integration.
How do you find all these great websites!
Twitter 🙂
Hi! Do you know if there is a way to create the images but not have them appear in the public gallery? I made one and found that it was featured on the home page.
I don’t believe that there is a way to create them without them showing up in the gallery. Did anyone else notice an option to not display it publicly?
I keep getting an error message at http://www.youareyourwords.com….any ideas?
Yes, that is a bad link, use this http://www.youareyourwords.com/ link!
I cant get this to work 🙁 just wondering what im doing wrong. It just keeps saying loading, any help would be great
It is pretty loaded up with flash content…bogs down depending on browser and plugins :/
For some reason I am not able to upload the photo, or at least it seems to take ages…
I have tried time & time again! It will not load! It just sits there forever! My friend even left it on all night, & when she woke up it still wasn’t loaded! Any ideas? I use safari & she uses google chrome plus both pics were under 1Mb! There shouldn’t be any problems!
Hmm, I’m not sure what the problem is there. We may need to contact the site and see if there is a plugin or something that is missing.
I cannot get a picture to upload, any ideas??
I am not able to upload a picture, either. I’m using Safari. Any ideas? I really want to try this!!!!
I am having the same problem with the picture not loading. I do not see a way to contact the site. Does anyone have an idea how to fix this issue?
I’m sorry…no idea how to make this work!
I have been having the same problem for 2 days!! I want to try this site and it keeps saying it’s loading but never loads!
I been having the same problem for a couple weeks… I have tried every couple days and it just keeps saying loading.
I loved the idea but try and try and my picture doesn’t load, reading the comments I see I’m not the only one with this problem
anyone know who may be failing? I have tried with Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome and none is …
or else some idea of how to achieve the same result with another page or technique?
Same issue 🙁 Final picture does not load.
Boo! Seems to be BROKEN.
So frustrating…will this ever work? I have tried Google Chrome, Safari and Firefox…add the Captcha code..no prob…choose picture and then it loads and loads and loads..and nothing happens:(
I haven’t been able to get it to work for quite some time… SAD
Is it not working anymore? I’m having trouble finding the app.