I teach evening classes for Maize Recreation Commission. Last night I was teaching a basic MS Word class. I was covering spellcheck, readability statistics and the thesaurus. I told the group of women that were in my class that a fun way to help students increase their vocabulary is to have them type a paragraph or two in Word and then look at the readability statistics to see their grade level as rated by the Flesch-Kincaid Readability scale. Next, students use the thesaurus to try to up their Flesch-Kincaid grade level.

For some reason, this task is irresistible to most people. The group spent a good 15 minutes trying to "graduate" from high school with their paragraphs. In the classroom, it is important to not only have the kids try out the new words in their paragraphs, but to delve deeper into the words they choose to help them understand if the chosen word is the best word for the sentence. Combining a thesaurus and a dictionary often does the trick!



Visuwords

Visuwords is an online graphical dictionary and thesaurus. The words and their meanings are presented in a mind-map fashion so the user can easily see associations between them. The sourcecode can be downloaded for free.



Visual Thesaurus

Thinkmap touts Visual Thesaurus as a "3D interactive reference tool". Another graphical dictionary and thesaurus, but with a lot more meat to the website. With featured word lists, Word of the Day, contests, lesson plans, articles, and much more, this website packs a punch. It comes at a price, but well worth the money. A CD version is also available.



RhymeZone

This site isn't as pretty and certainly less graphical than the above, but I think students would get a kick out of it. At RhymeZone type in a word, and choose to see its definition, synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, rhyming words, quotations containing the word, and much more. Very straight forward and easy to use. Bookmark this one today!

The Price of Gas

I heard on the news this morning that Snickers and m&m's prices are going up. The story cited spiraling costs as the reason, based on the rising cost of gas. It seems as if every day I hear a news report blaming the price of gas for rising prices.
Thank goodness that the Internet doesn't use gas! I would have to take out a second mortgage on my house if it did. It's funny how quickly the Internet became integrated technology, in that in the business world, it is expected, just as telephones are. While there are still many homes that don't have service, there are many places a person can go to get connected for free.

Wordle
Wordle is a fun little Java applet that allows you to make a "word cloud" out of text that you input. The website calls it a toy, but I feel the possibilities for teachers and students make it much more than a toy. I used it to make a design for my class reunion. Its fun...check it out!