There's No Place Like Homepage

Growing up in Kansas, I have always been a big fan of The Wizard Of Oz movie. I can remember watching it even as a little girl. The flying monkeys used to terrify me. However, being a Kansas native, tornadoes do not scare me. I love the thrill of hearing the sirens go off and stepping outside to look for funnel clouds. Of course I respect their power and know when it is time to seek shelter. When my husband and I were first married, we lived in a mobile home in south Wichita. We weathered a tornado or two in the storm shelter provided by the park. Luckily, our little trailer survived each twister event while we lived there.

As tornado season approaches once again in Kansas, (the sirens actually did go off a few weeks ago...you never know in Kansas!), I will look forward to the excitement, and hope for the best for myself, neighbors, family, and friends.



Schoolr

Schoolr is a one-page resource source that could certainly double as a very useful homepage for students and adults alike. Organized on this single page are search fields for:

Google

Wikipedia

Dictionary.com

Thesaurus.com

Acronym Finder

Urban Dictionary

Also, you can convert units of measure, translate text and create citations using Citation Builder. This very convenient packaging of many useful sites could leaving you saying, "There's no place like home(page)."

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!