WHAT
Wordsift - just like its name, this website is a brilliant tool of 'sifting' or isolating the important or useful words and group it as one. Now, could you imagine how this tool contribute to lesson planning?It is useful as a pre-reading activity where when you have a long story or article, and you can let this tool choose the important words from that. It delete common words and the words that give the gist of the article stay.
It is not sifting the important words alone, it has also has supportive function like visual meaning and thesauraus. For a student, it will surely help them doing reading preparation because rather than isolating the important words, they would also able to quickly look at the meaning of a difficult words in one click. Easy tool motivate learning.
The context of the way a word is used is also provided in one page through sampling. This is very useful where teachers may help students to further understand the meaning of a word through context.
HOW
- Paste the text into the box. Text can be taken online. (poems, short story, journal, extract, etc)
- Click Sift
EXAMPLE
Text: Poem by Joey Rodriguez, 'Tears, Pain and a Happy End'
- I sift the long poem and it gives you a gist of its content.
As you may notice,
- Sorting - You could sort out the words from 'rare to commmon' or 'A to Z' and vice versa, depending on your choice.
- Frequent words - The most frequent words are bigger than the rest
- Visualise the word - through google image search engine provided.
- Visual thesauraus - where the thesauraus of the word is shown.
- Sample Text - you could take out the sample of how a word is used in the text. Example below shows how the word 'upon' is used in a text.
ADVANTAGES
- Classroom activity - A good tool for pre-reading / pre-listening activity.
- Instant meaning - If students wanted to know a meaning of a word, they could easily click the word, and the associated words will appear in the Visual Thesauraus box.
- Visual meaning - There is a visual section where some words are better explained through picture rather than another definition.
- Sorting words - I find this interesting because we can choose to sort the words from common to rare. In other words, it helps teachers identify the difficult words that need to be taught.
- Sampling - It could take out the sentence where a particular word being used. Students could refer to the usage of a word.
CONCLUSION
This is a suggested website for both students and teachers. Students could use it as a reading preparation and teachers may want to come out with an idea of teaching using the information given here. Worth a try!
This is a suggested website for both students and teachers. Students could use it as a reading preparation and teachers may want to come out with an idea of teaching using the information given here. Worth a try!
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