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.

Have You Heard (and Seen the Word)?--Lexipedia

If you teach Language Arts, English, Writing, and/or Reading, take a few minutes to swing by Lexipedia. This nifty site is a place where "words have meaning" and it shows. Lexipedia demonstrates the fact by taking given terms and generating semantic relationships in animated word webs. This kind of tool is great for pupils who are trying to ferret the meaning on new vocabulary terms. Used in conjunction with the rich, interactive student materials at ReadWriteThink, the robust resources that Lexipedia brings into play will help both beginning and advanced learners build for better comprehension across all manner of disciplines.

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.