BP5_Wordsift WEB 2.0 Where Verbal meets Visual

I sifted the first paragraph of the short story "The Necklace."

Good teachers preview instruction with their students, guide their instruction as they teach and assess what was learned.  Now what if they could do all those things in one easy to use application?  Impossible?  Difficult?  Not anymore with Wordsift (http://www.wordsift.com/).

This Web 2.0 tool helps all teachers – no matter their content area or discipline – with introducing, teaching and even assessing vocabulary.  Let’s face reality.  Today’s students are digital natives who are so bombarded with images that they prefer it to text.  As a result verbal literacy is on the decline. One of the best ways to improve reading comprehension and fluency is through vocabulary development.

Recognizing the value of both verbal and visual literacy, the creator, Kenji Hakuta, developed this creative tool for students and their teachers.  And, oh yeah, parents can run with this too! 

Here’s how it works:  Copy and paste any text you want to analyze to the text box and click “sift.”  In seconds, the 50 most common words are formed into a tag cloud similar to Wordle (see http://www.wordle.net/).  The largest words are the frequent words in the posted text.  Here’s where verbal meets visual.  Visual images and a visual thesaurus are generated to connect the words to the type of media our students are used to and have opportunities to read to learn while they improve their learning to read skills like word recognition and comprehension via context clues and main idea.  Each sentence where the word appears is displayed in its original context and with a click can be highlighted within the full text of the reading passage.

Let the Fun Begin! 

·      Teachers can preview vocabulary.

·      Have students make predictions.

·      Display words across content areas to show relationships between academic disciplines.

·      Sort words in a number of ways such as frequency or alphabetical order. 

·      Click on any word in the cloud and an image from Google images appears and can be selected to create worksheets or student-made projects.

·      Students can identify the main idea via the most frequent noun(s) and verb(s).

·       Students can look for repetition.

·      Create a Pictionary.

·      Facilitate or have students facilitate discussions about the words.

·      Assess students on vocabulary acquisition by having them write across your subject area using words from the tag cloud.

·      Type your strategy here…