Instructify

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

Finally, you can find out the name of those little holes in your shoe you thread the laces through (eyelet). The Merriam-Webster Visual Dictionary Online sorts pictures of words by category (home, transportation, astronomy, sports and games, all kinds of stuff). You can then look at the pictures to visually identify what you’re looking for.

The Visual Dictionary works great at helping students figure out a specific part for a complex thing like, say, a combustion engine. Or you identify that spider crawling on your desk to see if it’s poisonous. And best of all, you no longer have to describe something as, “That doohickey that detaches from the thing.” –BILL FERRIS

Merriam-Webster Visual Dictionary Online

With all the shorthand OMG LOL business happening in children’s lives, sites like Merriam-Webster’s Word Central help to rectify the damage that has been done. Here, youngsters can get a leg up on building their own vocabulary while having fun. There are a couple of games, including Robo-Bee, which tests users’ language skills and word choice, and BIGbot where you feed the right vocabulary words to a hungry robot based on the definitions given. You’ll also find a Daily Buzzword with complete archive and an RSS feed to keep your students in the know. And as you might expect from Merriam-Webster, there is a searchable dictionary, thesaurus and rhyming dictionary.

One of the niftiest aspects of the site, though, is the Build Your Own Dictionary. In a pseudo-wiki format, this feature allows users to submit their own words and definitions. Some are hilarious:

juggleglug
Function: verb
Definition: to juggle and drink something at the same time. Example Sentence: That clown sure knows how to juggleglug.

and others are more hilarious, and even rather useful:

smorange
Function: adjective
Definition: extraordinary or special and different from other people but wanting to fit in at times. Word History: decided to make up a word that rhymes with orange

Example Sentence: She is very smorange.

There are some great resources for teachers here, too, including information that answers the question: How do words get in the dictionary? Check out the site to find out. –JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Word Central

I love my word processor. It’s fast, convenient, and comes with one of the great boons to mankind, the spell checker. Maybe my over-reliance on a computerized dictionary is why I never went farther in my Spanish classes. All that technology, and it still couldn’t tell me when I’d made a typo. But now, foreign language students can ensure their spelling is sublime with Orangoo.

Orangoo is simplicity itself. Just paste your text into the text box, select from one of two dozen supported languages like Spanish, English, Russian, Italian, Turkish, Danish, and lots more (sorry Latin). Then hit the “Check spelling” link. Misspelled words will be highlighted, and Orangoo will suggest words from its dictionary. Pretty much like your standard spell-check, except a lot more versatile. If you’re technically inclined, Orangoo’s code is open-source, so feel free to install it in your own Web applications.

Aren’t you glad you now know about Orangoo? For that matter, aren’t you glad I didn’t write, “Orangoo glad”? –BILL FERRIS

With the success of technological advancements catapulting us into a world full of visual stimuli, learners are becoming more and more in need of visual qualifiers in order to completely understand a topic. Wikipedia and its brethren have done a wonderful job of linking topics by embedding links to other articles on the site and what the relationship is between subjects. Unfortunately, so often it happens that you’ll be doing some light research on Cane Toads, and the next thing you know, you’re on an article about Ultima Online shard emulation and you have no breadcrumbs to show you the path that led you into this distraction. Visuwords is the remedy for these black holes of information. The site is predominantly an application designed to visually show the links between words and their meanings, origins, and uses.

Simply type in a word into the search space, or hit the Random button to get a completely arbitrary word. The word appears as the center, and suddenly becomes surrounded by wistfully hovering orbs, each with a bond to other words that relate to it. Because of the Flash element to the application, you can drag the viewing area around, and you can expand any of the links and their subsequent connections just by double clicking one of the bubbles. The bubbles are color coded by noun, verb, adjective and adverb. The connections between the words are color coded and specific - for example, a solid green line means, “is a kind of.” Think of this as the model of an atom, with the search word as your nucleus, and the surrounding words as the electrons and such that make up the atom. Check it out for yourself, and maybe you’ll find that visually learning words and their meanings might be your thing. –JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Visuwords

My senior year of high school, my family hosted a Thai foreign exchange student. Some mornings I spent the entire ride to school modeling pronunciations for her. She was endlessly fascinated with the sequence of sounds in “oil” (and endlessly frustrated trying to produce them herself) and would have me toil through “boil, broil, coil” ‘til my tongue felt despoiled by the moil of it. I was not always the most patient instructor.

If only I could have offered my eager student the services of Chuala.com, where you can hear looped recordings of standard pronunciations: voila (which looks like it rhymes with “oil” but thankfully doesn’t), tireless tutor. My favorite part of the site is that you’re able to record yourself saying a word and listen to it in comparison to the site’s pronunciation in turn. Students who come across difficult new words in their readings could look them up here, or you could check on the pronunciations of words that have always given you trouble (I practiced with “accompanist”… I never say that right!).

The site offers pronunciations in 9 other languages, so it could potentially be of service in foreign language classrooms. My own searches in Spanish were disappointing, not even the days of the week were offered, but Chuala is a “language community,” so if you find words that are missing you can register to add them yourself.

One word of warning: the woman who speaks the samples is no computerized voice, she’s a total sweet-talker… monitor your time on the site, if you notice yourself looking up words like “cat” you may have fallen victim to her siren song. –MARIELLE PRINCE

Chuala.com

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From homophones to the Great Vowel Shift to good ol’ colloquialisms, there are plenty of reasons that the English language has a hard time making the transfer from talk to text. If reading your students’ papers has become tortuous for your grammatical sensibilities, try and have blundering writers figure out what they should of done differently by checking out Washington State University Professor Paul Brians’ list of Common Errors in English.

Here they’ll find out why implying isn’t the exact same as inferring, and when its right to put a space into “into.” The list is presented alphabetically and all on one page – a bit daunting at first glance, but clicking on any of the troublesome words leads to a comfortingly concise and easy to understand explanation. Brians makes clear distinctions between usages that are ungrammatical and usages that simply non-standard, and sometimes includes interesting factoids about the history of the word’s use.

As always, insure that you can walk the talk first… do you ever make any of the errs I made hear? If so, you might want to give the site a look-see yourself! -MARIELLE PRINCE

Common Errors in English