Here's a cool tool I discovered in this list today. It's called Word Sift. You paste some text into a box and click Sift. A bit like Wordle it identifies the common usage of words in the text (the example above in keeping with Black History Month is Martin Luther King Jnr's "I have a dream" speech). You can then sift this again alphabetically (A-Z, Z-A, Rare to Common, Common to rare). A further sift is supplied according to curriculum relevance. I chose the word "time" and clicked on Language Arts.
Beneath the text appear pictures (sourced from Google I imagine) and the very cool Visual Thesaurus, which presents synonyms for the selected word as a kind of mindmap.
Using this tool might be a great way to do an initial analysis of a longer piece of writing for common words, themes, related images and map of meanings before the detailed line by line reading.
this is great, what a great tool. ive used wordle a fair bit in class, its great for openings and its gets the students looking for words they recognize.
ReplyDeleteIm going to try word sift for my Lord Of the Flies lesson next week, ill let you know how it goes!