Easy from A to Z

Need to alphabetize a list of words? Drop by Alphabetize.org and let this useful site do the heavy lifting.

C'mon, Baby, Let's Do The (Text) Twist

My nephew (who has just started blogging) shared a nifty little game that helps him with his spelling. The game is called Text Twist. I doubt anyone will be able to access it from school but hopefully, folks will give it a whirl when they get home. It's addictive.



Related links: Here are a few other linguistic links that word-lovers will appreciate.

• AllWords,
• Free Rice
• Merriam-Webster’s Online Word of the Day,
• New York Times Word of the Day,
• Princeton University’s WordNet (as well as the online version of WordNet),
• Samuel Stoddard’s Fun With Words.
• the oddly addictive connected thesaurus known as Lexical FreeNet,
• the Visual Thesaurus,
• Visuwords,
• Vocabula Review,
• Wikipedia’s definition of word,
• Wordsmith.org’s AWAD, and
• World Wide Words.

News That's Fit to Print

I heard about the following resource via a GeekBrief.TV podcast. What with the cost and scarcity of paper, I know a lot of educators who will use and appreciate PrintWhatYouLike.

Let Me See What's On Your Mind

Recently, an elementary Language Arts teacher asked me if I knew of any good, free resources for helping her students generate cognitive maps. She was particularly interested in any resource that didn't require downloading and/or installation of software. Without missing a beat I suggested she check out Text2MindMap, a web-based resource that quickly converts text outlines into pretty spiffy mind maps. All a user has to do is create an outline in the box on the screen and click the CONVERT TO MIND MAP button. That's it!

What makes this resource so handy is that it can be used beyond the Language Arts classroom, any place where an outline is being explored. For example, if, in a Science classroom, a group of students are discussing the structure of the Solar System, an outline could be generated and typed in the box.

After a general consensus about the information, the students click the CONVERT TO MIND MAP BUTTON.
Within a few seconds, the group of students has a mind map of the topic.

The group can tinker with the mind map by working with the CONTROLS features.
Best of all, the mind map can be SAVED and used offline!
A click of the SAVE MAP button yields a jpg image that can be used in a slideshow or word processing document.


Why not have your students check out and use this snappy tool for learning?

The Write Stuff: Text Content Analysis Tool

There are definite advantages to having students compose written assignments using a word processor. For starters, many pupils (and adults) are often reluctant to write anything with a pencil or pen because they know that, after initial editing, they’ll eventually have to reconstruct the work again and again and again. Ugh! Typing their thoughts, no matter how meager the text, saves nascent authors from the hassles and frustrations of rewriting by hand. Once aspiring writers have captured the essence of their ideas in digital form, the process for crystallizing and refining concepts becomes even more efficient. The availability of a built-in dictionary/thesaurus, ever present, ever ready to offer robust linguistic assistance makes word processing even more attractive and doable. Digital manipulation of written assignments also makes sharing drafts with teacher and peers possible and much more likely, Just ask any educator or student who has used Google Docs to benefit from the power of collaboration.

For educators who are prudent enough to allow learners to integrate technology in this manner there’s an additional perk: an online text analysis resource from UsingEnglish.com. After pasting student-generated text into the UE Text Content Analyser this useful site displays statistics such as:

• a word count
• the number of unique words in the work
• the number of sentences in a pasted passage
• the average words per sentence
• information about lexical density
• and data regarding the Gunning Fog readability index.

:-)

All a-Twitter Over TinyPaste

After dropping by TechCrunch this morning I read a nifty story by Mark Hendrickson about TinyPaste. It's news that I'm sure all of my Twitter-using friends will appreciate. When my pals exceed their 140 character limit in Twitter (now who'd ever do something like that?) they can turn to TinyPaste where, after pasting a larger than allowed block of text, the service conveniently generates a short URL. The short link sends its users to a page displaying the poster’s message. Like Hendrickson notes, it's sort of "like TinyURL for text."

Wandering Around with My Head in the (Word) Clouds

For those of you who enjoy tinkering with text, there's an intriguing new toy on the web. Check out Wordle. The site provides visitors with a means of creating word clouds from their own, user-generated text. A word cloud is an engaging visual depiction of frequently used words. These textual clouds depict keyword density using font size. The more often a word appears, the larger it is within the confines of the word cloud. Clouds at Wordle can be constructed using different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.