WordFoto - now you can read a photo

 To be perfectly honest, I was scratching my head in a one to one class recently, with a very bright young lad wading through his (not ours) phonics book. It's a very dry affair; each page unimaginatively the same as the last, minute line art pictures as mysteriously unfathomable as they are hard to see.

There has to be a way to make this a bit more interesting, I was thinking to myself. I didn't want to make a list on the board (lazy, and just the same thing again). I thought about a mind map, but we've done that before.

Brainwave: WordFoto (find it here) app

I wrote the big 'ph' in fat chalk on the board + 'sounds like /f/' & took a quick picture. Then opened up the picture in the wordfoto app. There's a grey toolbar across the bottom.

• crop the pic if necessary; I wanted it nice & tight.
• words - tap this and then select "add a new wrod set >". add each word you want to see in the image as a new item
• style allows you to find a treatment of your picture you are happy with - pre-set transformations of your image as well as adding your word list in different fonts (compare ph set vs wh set below)
• finetune - does exactly that!

When you are happy with that, you can save to album or export to Facebook or by mail.

NB The images are not intended to be definitive lists of all the words in the English language with ph spellings as /f/, or wh with a silent h.  What posting to FB did was generate a blizzard of suggestions though (and some nice exceptions - shepherd & haphazard).

Now I can save these images to my YLs Evernote dossier too, for future reference. How have you exploited WordFoto? Would love to know!

.