WordSift - Isolating important words

LINK: http://www.wordsift.com/

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

1. Paste the text into the box.  Text can be taken online. (poems, short story, journal, extract, etc)
2. 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. 

Jay Rodriguez

Poem Source: http://www.loveislonely.com

Jay Rodriguez

Poem Source: http://www.loveislonely.com

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!

Wordle - Word Cloud

LINK:  http://www.wordle.net/

WHAT

Wordle is a tool to generate word cloud as shown below. It makes the most frequent word larger than the rest. What is best with this tool is that you could choose how do you display the words.

The frequent words are larger than the rest, make students pay attention of the particular word that is also an important content to the text. It is suitable for pre-reading activity.

EXAMPLE 

Text: 'I Believe I Can Fly' by R.Kelly

As you could see, it is presented in an interesting way. 

HOW

• Go to the page. You will be directed to the website. 

• Create your own - There is a little explanation of what the web is about. Few examples are shown as well. You could click the 'create your own' link to start making your own. 

• Paste text - As you could see, you could paste the text in the space provided. 
• Paste URL - Besides, you could also paste a URL of webpage and it will create a wordle of that page. For example, I use this blog URL and it will generate a word cloud of my blog. 'Student' is one of the most frequent word in my blog.

• Click 'submit' button - You will be directed to this page:

 

Using the same text, there are few editing that could be performed if we want to. 

• Edit - you could undo the editing
• Language - you could leave the word as spelled, or guess the word (this is for ...). Make the word upper case or lower case.  Besides, you could also delete the common words and words in another language.
• Font - various fonts 
• Layout - this is useful editing tool to avoid word crowded if you choose to a very long text. You could choose the maximum words and the less frequent words are not choosen. Re-arrange them in alphabetical order, horizontally or vertically.
• Colour -Make it colourful 
• Right click - If you right click the word, you could remove the word from the text. 
• Randomize - basically it gives you choices of different layout.

Besides editing,

• Print - Print it directly
• Save - Save it to public galerry to be viewed by all internet users, as well as share it with your friends.
• Embedded code - Once you save it, there is a code that could be embedded in your own blog or homepage. This link will direct the users to the wordle site. 

ADVANTAGES

• Useful for pre-reading or pre-listening activity. Since we could edit the amount of words shown, and also its ability to make the most frequent words bigger than the rest, it works well as a summary of a long text. Students get the gist of the text before proceeding to the next activity. 
• Colours and different shape. 

DISADVANTAGES

• There is no URL link provided but only embedded code. 

CONCLUSION

This website promoting a more interesting way of presenting a text. I would use it for variation in my classroom activity because it comes in shape and colours. So, if it could light up the mood, it will surely come in handy.