Instructify

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

I have one of those humongous Oxford Unabridged Dictionaries at home, but I really couldn’t tell you where it is right now. I don’t ever open it anymore thanks to Wordnik, and my back is probably better off for it not lifting that 20-pound tome.

Wordnik gets me the information I need much faster, as well as providing an experience that a paper dictionary can’t match. When you look up a word on Wordnik, it doesn’t merely give you a definition with an audio playback. You get all the word’s possible definitions, examples of the word in publication, current usage of the word on twitter, synonyms, etymology, and even its Scrabble score. It may seem like information overload, but Wordnik puts all this data on one page so I don’t have to click far or travel to other sites to get any tangential information I might want.

One thing I feel Wordnik needs to be address is that, under the section “Elsewhere on the Web” where you can see the definitions the other sites use, Urban Dictionary is one of the links. Urban Dictionary is not appropriate for students (to say the least), and as such, Wordnik might be a good tool for a teacher to use, but probably not a good choice to give to students and let them run with it.

Wordnik

Related stuff

Map word relationships at Lexipedia

Memidex bookmarklet makes word definitions leap off the page

What if the OED cared about your feelings?

Keep your synonyms simple with Thsrs

BY CHRISTOPHER PANNA

If your classroom has a projector, TV, or interactive white board connected to a computer, you’ve no doubt used it to show websites to your class. If you use the Firefox web browser, you probably know about the many helpful add-ons available. The following must-have extensions will change the way you use the web in class.

Adblock Plus: As the name implies, this removes distracting ads from many web pages. Spaces that used to be filled with advertisements will appear blank, allowing your students to focus on what’s important. Once you install Adblock Plus, it will prompt you to choose a filter subscription –- go with “Easy List,” which will block the most common ads.

Image Zoom: For those times when you’re showing a picture on the screen and you need it to be larger or smaller, Image Zoom does the trick. It allows you to resize any picture right on the page on which it appears. This is especially handy for switching between full-screen and zoomed-in views of a picture.

Dictionary Tooltip: This add-on works like a fairy godmother of vocabulary, helping you instantly answer the question, “What does that word mean?” Double-click any word and a small window will appear with a dictionary/thesaurus entry. Question answered.

Pronounce: Sure, you can tell your students how to pronounce a word, unless they encounter a difficult word outside of class. With the Pronounce extension, simply highlight a word, right-click, and choose Pronounce. Don’t forget to turn on your speakers!

I’ve described the basic functions of these add-ons, but each one has further options for customization. Try them yourself and adjust the settings to your liking. If you like the way these work, check out the main page for Firefox add-ons and see what other gems you can find.

BY BILL FERRIS

You can easily find an online dictionary or thesaurus. Lexipedia, however, presents an interesting combination of the two. Type in a word, and you’ll get visual array of related words, each with a listing of its definition and usage, and an audio file of the word’s pronunciation.

If you’re looking for a fancier way to say…well, “fancy,” for instance, then Lexipedia will break down the possible contenders by nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, as well as find related words. (more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

When I’m reading content on the web, I hate to have to stop what I’m doing to look up a word. Here’s guessing that you and your students do, too. Rather than navigating away from the page in search of a definition and running the risk of then getting distracted by something shiny, try this new browser bookmarklet from Memidex.

(more…)

Every year, there’s an announcement that the dictionary has added new words like “fanboy,” “muggle,” or “air quotes.” Well, to make room for those, they have to drop less-commonly used words like “blateration” (blabber or chatter), “jungible” (that which may be joined) or “jobler” (someone who does small jobs; also, a great name for a Web 2.0 startup). If you feel this grave injustice will surely bring theomeny (the fury of God) to Merriam-Webster and the OED alike, you should immediately head to Save The Words.

Save The Words lets you adopt one of these cast-off words so that you can use them “in conversation and correspondence, as frequently as possible to the very best of [your] ability.” You can even print an adoption certificate.

If simply using your adopted word isn’t enough, you can order T-shirts with your word emblazoned on the front. But if you really want to bring a word back, Save The Words suggests tattooing your word or using it as a name for your new pet or child. However, you may be better off having each student in your English class picking out a word and awarding a couple extra points if they can work it in to their next essay. -BILL FERRIS

Save The Words

Related Stuff:

What if the OED cared about your feelings?

Find the Right Word with OneLook Reverse Dictionary

Do Your Students Know These Words?

Word Source is a site that calls itself “the social dictionary,” and at first, that made me very skeptical. It’s not that I dislike people, but I believe some things are better experienced alone. Is there a more blissfully solitary activity than looking up a word? Discovering its origin? Its subtle shades of meaning? Why does my dictionary have to be social now, too?

Of course, using reference sources isn’t so exciting for everyone, and that’s precisely why Word Source is great. The site lets you tag and rate each word, indicating that you like or dislike it, that you can say it five times fast, that it caused you to fail an English test, or that it makes you feel “all warm and fuzzy inside.” Searchers can then see how other users feel about a particular word. How many high school students would love to exact revenge on a prickly SAT word by tagging that it makes them nauseous?

There are other features that even this anti-social librarian loves, like the advanced search options, which let you search an exact word, a prefix, or a suffix, and which allow the use of wild card characters when you’re not quite sure how a word is spelled. And for those who don’t like bells and whistles, you can look up a word without even visiting the website, by typing word.sc/[your word] into your browser’s address bar. For example, try typing in word.sc/social.

Word Source also does a simultaneous Flickr search to find photos of your word, which is great if you’re searching for a noun, and not so great if you’re searching for an adjective. A search for “Pomeranian” yielded, of course, thousands of adorable photos of dogs, but a search for “concomitant” yielded an out-of-focus shot of someone’s bare foot. The Flickr-searching feature is cute, but it only works as well as people’s Flickr tags. Which is to say, unfortunately, not very well.

Still, there’s lots to like about Word Source, especially for those students for whom “look it up” sounds like a prison sentence. -EMILY JACK

Word Source

Related stuff:

Keep your synonyms simple with Thsrs

Find the Right Word with OneLook Reverse Dictionary

The Root of the Issue: Review Word Roots with this SAT Word Game

When I was a student, I would only use the thesaurus to look up bigger, more intelligent-sounding words, so I could trick my teachers into thinking that I was really smart (in retrospect, it most likely didn’t work). With age, though, I’ve gotten much wiser and I’ve learned to value using simpler words in my writing. Like George Orwell once said, “Never use a long word where a short one will do.”

With this philosophy in mind, the brains behind the Ironic Sans blog (creators of the addictive 50 States in 10 Minutes game) have come up with Thsrs, an online thesaurus that only suggests synonyms which are shorter than the word you look up. Enter “flabbergasted” and it suggests “surprised,” look up “inconsequential” and you get “unimportant.” Perfect!

So you might ask yourself, why would I ever need a shorter word? Well, aside from the sage advice of our dear friend George up there, the ways in which we communicate are continuously evolving. And, with the onset of micro-blogging platforms, like Twitter, and the widespread popularity of text messaging, keeping your thoughts clear and concise is crucial.

And, Thsrs makes a great tool with which to share this sentiment with your students — who I’m sure are bombarded everyday by excessive “txt msg” LOL OMG shorthand — to improve both their writing and their communication skills. Steer them in the right syntactic direction with shorter, simpler words and fewer ridiculous abbreviations — and make Mr. Orwell proud! — LAUREN FROHNE

Thsrs

Related Stuff:

Find Some Answers at Ask for Kids

Word Central is Awesometastic

Choke on Your Own Hubris as You Fail to Name All 50 States in 10 Minutes

Top 10 Office Supply Hacks – Get some extra mileage out of the supply closet. Lifehacker has 10 bonus uses for everyday office supplies. Keep snack foods fresh by using binder clips as chip clips. Did some clod write on your white board with permanant marker? Dry erase ink will make it come right off. You’ll want these ideas handy before class starts again.

17 Writing Secrets  – Want to bump your students’ writing from good to great (or at least from middling to halfway decent), Writer’s Digest presents these 17 writing secrets to help students make good word choices, and remind them of the importance of fixing stuff that’s kinda wordy and lame revision.

101+ Web Resources for Students – Courtesy of StudentHacks.org, this list is pretty much what it sounds like. It features everything from dictionaries to Shakespeare’s complete works to resources for the yearbook staff. If your students are looking for some handy Web tools, this is a great place to start.

100 Helpful Web Tools for Every Kind of Learner – Different students learn in different ways. What works for visual learners may not make sense to a kinesthetic learner. If you’re fixing to differentiate your instruction, check out these tools that cater to different learning styles. -BILL FERRIS

Photo credit: MarkyBon on flickr

Sure, your phone plays music, surfs the Web, sends email, and has GPS capability (and you can, you know, talk to people with it, too). That stuff is cool, don’t get me wrong, but we’ve only scratched the surface of what these handheld powerhouses can do. Now, with one simple download, you can give your phone some extra power you can use in the classroom thanks to gWhiz.

gWhiz is a suite of mobile learning tools that includes a powerful graphing calculator, a personalized reference library, and a flash card application. If Little Johnny wants to email his friends the graph of a tricky equation, he can do it straight from his phone. Create custom reference guides for an upcoming test on state capitals. Students will be able to get a lot of mileage from these apps, and they’ll always be within easy reach.

Now, the bad news. Right now, gWhiz is only available for BlackBerry phones. They’re working on adding more phone compatibility, though, including Google’s upcoming Android mobile phone platform. Maybe by the time summer vacation is over I can add gWhiz to my Motorola Razr (or maybe not). If you don’t have a BlackBerry, you may want to check back in a few months to see when gWhiz will be compatible with your phone.

Schools can really benefit from enhanced phone technology, since these devices are small, increasingly powerful, and within the price range of many students’ families. Applications like gWhiz can leverage this technology to create a powerful learning tool within the palm of every student’s hand. -BILL FERRIS

gWhiz

Do your students need help pronouncing a tricky or unfamiliar word while doing research? Or are you an ESL teacher helping kids with their English pronunciation. If you use Firefox (and you definitely should), you should add the Pronounce extension. Just highlight the word that’s giving your kids trouble, right click and choose “Pronounce” from the menu. Firefox will then speak the word out loud with correct English pronunciation.

We’ve covered pronunciation tools before, such as howjsay. The Pronounce extension has a slight edge for two reasons: since it’s integrated into your browser, you don’t have to go to another website to look up the word, thereby saving you time. And second, the pronunciations come from Merriam-Webster OnLine, so you get the the definitive American pronunciation, as opposed to howjsay’s British pronunciation of words like “aluminum” or “blueberry.” -BILL FERRIS

Pronounce
Pronounce Tells You How to Say It via Lifehacker

Related Stuff:
Say it Like You Mean It–howjsay.com
Potato, Potahto? Before you call the whole thing off, consult Chuala

Give your foreign language students some extra ammunition. No, I don’t mean teach them obscure French curse words. I’m talking about powerful lessons and practice that can supplement the great stuff you’re already teaching in class. They can get it with LingQ.

LingQ lets students sign up for free lessons in the language of their choice (language include Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish). If you’re teaching ESL, they can also study English (or any other language) in their native tongue. In the assignments, if they see a word they don’t know, they can highlight it and hit the LingQ button. LingQ will define it and create a flashcard for later review.

Students will also get a progress snapshot, which keeps track of benchmarks like how many words they’ve learned, the number of hours spent listening to lessons or speaking, etc. They’ll also get a list of Priority LingQs, which are the 25 most important words they should learn at whatever skill level they’re at. Students can review Priority LingQs by clicking on the the word to view the definition, or display them as flash cards.The free account lets students have five active assignments at any given time.

You can pay extra for more active assignments at once, plus points you can use for personal tutoring, though if they heard about LingQ from you, they’ve already got a live-and-in-person language guru. Still, students can get an awful lot of LingQ for free. The only place with more free knowledge is in your classroom -BILL FERRIS

LingQ

Related Stuff:
Mango: Rhymes with Lingo (Sort Of)
Q’est Que C’est LiveMocha
¿Como se dice Podcast? ESL Pod
Escuchen la One Semester of Spanish Love Song

Don’t you hate it when a word gets stuck on the tip of your tongue? If you or your students rely too much on the word “thing” when trying to describe something, visit the OneLook Reverse Dictionary.

Type in an approximate definition, and you’ll get a list of words that may fit what you typed. Chances are you’ll know the word when you see it. And you may even add a few new terms to your vocabulary. -BILL FERRIS

OneLook Reverse Dictionary

Related Stuff:
Look it Up by Looking at It: Merriam-Webster Visual Dictionary

Words… I love them! I’ll take crosswords or curse words, word play or word-of-the-day; in lines, on lists, or out of lips, I just get a kick out of them. For this reason, a good friend of mine, who has recently started student teaching, thought I might be a good person to ask about fun ways to teach word roots to her high school classes. She was wrong. At first my answer was, “aren’t word roots like inherently fun?” Thinking I owed her something more useful, I figured I’d turn to one of my other great loves (the Internet).

The coolest thing I found was an SAT prep game at Quia.com. This game has Jeopardy-style, one- or two-player games for an impressive array of subjects – one of them being word roots. The game is actually quite difficult if you attempt it unprepared, but if your students are studying the roots that the game uses, then it would be about right. -MARIELLE PRINCE

SAT Word Game via Quia

Okay, high school teachers. The editors of the American Heritage dictionaries are putting you to the test. They’ve made a list of the 100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know. Your students are not going to learn these words off soda labels or bathroom stalls; you’re going to have to teach them. And don’t think you’re off the hook if you don’t teach English. There are words from Biology (chromosome, photosynthesis) and Chemistry (plasma, polymer), History (antebellum, oligarchy) and Civics (gerrymander, impeach) too. The list doesn’t include definitions, so if you need to refresh your memory on a few of these, open a new tab for (the adorable) Definr.com.

100 words, 4 years, let’s say 6 classes a year… just teach 5 of these in your class and you’ve done your part! -MARIELLE PRINCE

100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know via AskStudent

Photo Credit: Auntie P on flickr

A lot of times, I’ll use a word knowing that it is the right one to use, but I have no idea what it actually means. Then, I’ll have to know the definition to make sure I’m not botching the word’s usage. It’s either off to the shelf to thumb through that heavy dictionary, risking paper cuts and muscle fatigue, or it’s time to search for the word on Google, Wikipedia or some other ad-filled site with unreliable content. Face it, it’s tough on the eyes and who has time for all that searching!?! Well, not me, friends.

Definr is a tool designed to cut down on the time it takes to define a word and eliminates all the clutter that comes with online searching. Just start typing in the entry field and Definr will bring up a list of suggested words you might like defined, so you don’t even really know how to fully spell the word to get the right definition. If you are a Firefox user (which, hopefully, you are) then you can quickly install Definr right into your search engine bar. It really doesn’t get much easier than this when it comes to quickly defining words, nor do dictionary mascots get any cuter. — JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Definr