This week our focus in on teaching vocabulary. Researchers such as Robert Mazarno have discussed the critical need to explicitly teach vocabulary to our students since it is once of the biggest distinguishers between stronger and weaker students in our class. But how do we do it? Fortunately, there are some great Web 2.0 tools that we can use.
Visuwords is a great tools for students in the Year 9-12 range. This website is a visual dictionary/thesaurus. Students type in a word, and the page presents a visual, colour coded (for nouns, verbs, adjectives etc...) concept chart linking the word to synonyms. Students can scroll over each word and a definition is given. This is a great tool to use if you are working with vocabulary lists - and students need to identify the meanings of words they don't know. It's also a great way of students creating their own vocabulary lists to go with units that operate around a central theme.
Having fun with words is always a great way of learning them. Word Clouds can be an effective visual learning tool for students to acquire vocabulary, experiment with it, and think how others use it. Basically Word Clouds are tools for presenting words in a visually interesting way that looks like the one at the top of this post.
There are many sites on the internet that do this. One of the easiest to use is
ABC Word Clouds. A more advanced version is
Wordle. This page not only creates pictures, but gives the most prominence to words that are used most frequently in a piece of text - so students can use it to analyse language use in speeches, opinion pieces etc...For ideas about how to use Wordle see
this powerpoint presentation on SlideShare.
Last week we discussed how to download videos from Youtube direct to your computer - if you missed it, look at out
blog.
Regards,
The Ticking Mind Team
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