Wordsmyth-I like the Children's and Beginner's dictionary at Wordsmyth because they have easy to read entries with simple definitions. You can also make a vocab quiz or crossword puzzle. I tried making a quiz with some Reading Street vocab words and the sentences they created as a cloze exercise seemed very basic. I didn't care for it.
Lexipedia-I could see myself trying this out. You can look up a word and it gives you nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, synonyms, antonyms. Pretty cool!
Merriam-Webster Visual Dictionary Online-This dictionary has an index to quickly connect words to images. I looked up the word frost and it gave me two images. I also looked up volcano and it showed a picture of a volcano during eruption and it even labeled the volcano. That was pretty neat!
Wordle-At school I had difficulty using Wordle so I went with Word It Out instead. I played around with Wordle at home and I like it so much more. It seems easier to create your word cloud. There seems to be more you can do with the color, font, and display of the words. I am going to try using Wordle next time. I also took a look at all the ways to use Wordle and got some great ideas like: Having your class reflect on what they have learned, using it to take a poll about a topic, character traits, self-esteem boost where each person writes a word to describe the person or something nice and then a wordle is created all about that person, and using it in math to create a word cloud all about fraction vocabulary.
I don't always have access to the computer lab during the day because a class is using it. It would be helpful to have a few laptops that could be checked out for students to use for projects like these.
Great observations! Did you find a list of interesting ways to use Wordle with students somewhere?
ReplyDeleteI don't think the laptop idea will happen anytime soon, but the lab is free most mornings and most of the day on Monday if you want to come in.