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.
