Instructify

BY KEVIN HODGSON

Sometimes, the tools we stumble upon are just a way to add a little fun into the classroom. I’d put Font de Music into that category. Here, the site takes a small piece of writing — a short sentence seems to be about the limit — and adds a musical backing track, then makes the letters do a little dance to the music. You have some limited options, such as font style, and musical theme, and font color. Other than that, though, you can just sit back and watch your words get jiggy with it on the screen. If you’d like to invite others to your literary dance party, the site generates a link you can share. I did not find an embed code, though, which would be even more helpful.

You might use this site to spice up some lessons around vocabulary — what “mood” would you choose for an individual word? Or, if students were to create one of these musical pieces around their name, what decisions would they make around choice of font, color and music? It’s a simple, fun site with some possibilities for examining how multimedia and text influences our thinking around design choices.

Font de Music

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

Knoword is a site that is sure to keep the vocabulary part of your brain nimble and quick. Players are given the first letter of a word, then a short definition. From there, they have one minute to type in as many correct words as they can.Correct words provide you with some bonus time. (Registered users have access to features such as archiving their scores and more). While I found the regular mode challenging enough, there is a “hard” mode for those Scrabble/Crossword experts whose way with words can amaze just about anyone (you know who you are). On a recent play, the words ranged from Cat to Harness to Labyrinth, which gives you a good idea of the range of words and challenges drawn randomly from an online dictionary database.

This site might be a nice activity for middle and high school students who need a little more practice with vocabulary and fluency. The challenge of the clock might give some students a bit of intrinsic motivation, although others might get turned off by the time limits. One nice feature is that you can skip words that you find are too hard, so you won’t get caught in some endless loop of difficulty.

Knoword

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Expand your vocabulary with EasyWords

BY CHRISTOPHER PANNA

Often when we ask students to read, we want them to pick out key words or organize the text into categories. VocabGrabber is a powerful tool that helps do just that: organize, analyze, and understand a reading.

Simply paste the text and click the button marked (you guessed it) “Grab Vocabulary!” This generates a word cloud of the most frequently used terms. Clicking a word shows its definition and an example of how it’s used in the passage.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

There are many ways to increase a person’s vocabulary, from the classic pick-a-word from the dictionary each day (my father’s preferred method), to the little desk calendar with a daily vocabulary word on each page. But in this day and age people aren’t always working from the same desk each every day, and lugging around an unabridged Oxford English dictionary isn’t practical.

Enter EasyWords, a free downloadable application that helps you memorize and learn new words right from your computer. EasyWords runs in the background and, at an interval that you set, presents you with a vocab question. Once you select the correct answer, it goes away again. It’s pretty unobtrusive — you can just click close if you don’t want to be bothered right then.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Do your students need to study for that upcoming geography test? Perhaps the SATs are coming up? Well, flashcards are so 1994. It’s time to head over to Smart.fm. Smart.fm is a free learning and review system that is like your own personal study partner — a study partner that happens to have a super-slick multimedia review system in her backpack.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

I am a bit of an oddity in that I enjoyed taking the SAT, ACT, and GRE a great deal. Perhaps I’m just wired for that kind of thing, or maybe I’m a bit of an educational sadist. For many people who aren’t me, though, these tests and the preparation they require causes a great deal of stress and anxiety. If you have students sporting a twitching eye and worn-out appearance due to preparing for a standardized test, perhaps it’s time they checked out VocabSushi.

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SAT/ACT vocabulary flash cards are a popular (and totally boring) way to prepare for the most standard of standardized tests. Brainyflix is a site that aims to change the way kids learn and prepare for these daunting exams.

Brainyflix has a list of those pesky SAT vocabulary words, and students create videos or flashcards (in the form of those ubiquitous motivational posters) to define the word. Students are encouraged to be funny and creative while staying true to the mission of defining the word, and there is some great stuff out there. Imagine handing your students a video camera (the Flip is a great one) and sending them off to learn and practice their vocabulary, as opposed to having them labor over dictionaries and index cards! And if you don’t have the resources for students to upload their own creations, you can still learn from what other students have created (and vote on those creations, too!)

Brainyflix  also occasionally sponsors contests to drum up submissions. Currently, they are seeking entries for Brainypics (the photo flash cards), and the grand prize is $200 for the student and $200 for a school club or organization. One more advantage over the tedious dictionary lookup method! -GRETCHEN SCHAEFER

Brainyflix

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Want to know what strikes fear in the hearts of many a student? No, it isn’t the mystery meat in the cafeteria. In fact, it is the verbal section of any standardized test. I mean, how often do high schoolers use the word pertinacious in everyday conversation? Luckily for your students, VerbaLearn is here to make learning that vocabulary list much less tedious.

Once you create a free account, you can build a vocabulary list for the SAT, ACT, GRE, or General Vocabulary. Like any good teacher, VerbaLearn begins with a pre-assessment of your knowledge. It gives you an online quiz in which you either select the best definition, or the best synonym for a given word. It also allows you to specify whether your answer was “just a guess,” or if you’re “pretty sure.” If it was “just a guess,” it automatically goes on your study list. If you were “pretty sure,” you’ll see the word again in the quiz to give a synonym or definition, whichever you didn’t do the first time you saw the word. If you get it right the second time, you won’t see the word again. If you get it wrong, off it goes to your study list.

Once your study list is full, there are several options for study and review. You can continue to review online via fill-in-the-blank sentences, or you can review offline by subscribing to your personal vocabulary list podcast. You get an audio version downloaded to your favorite podcast aggregator that says the word, the definition, and a sentence using the word. All of the aforementioned features are free, though there are several other features such as video flashcards, crossword puzzles, and printed flashcards that you can get if you subscribe to the premium version.

Hopefully, this post has piqued your interest so that you will examine VerbaLearn punctiliously. Your students’ verbal fears will be assuaged as they become verbal gourmands using this website. -REBECCAH HAINES

VerbaLearn

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Do you have one of those classes that skipped some lessons on manners, like saying please and thank you? Do you have language learners who need to increase their vocabulary for social conversation? Is your class stuck in the blahs between the February holidays and spring break? You can meet these needs and more at Thanks-o-meter, a site that lets you write thank-you notes either free-style, or using the word choices they give you. That’s the creation part. Thanks-o-meter then takes the words picked and adds them to a graph showing how frequently others have used the words you picked. In addition, you can send the thank-you to your recipient as an email. Another plus, they are really trying to keep it school- and kid-friendly, giving rules for the road, and the ability to flag inappropriate content. So recognize others, teach manners, and teach vocabulary at Thanks-o-meter. -ALICE MERCER

Thanks-o-meter

A big thank you to Larry Ferlazzo for this tip

My thank you to our editor, Bill Ferris

Got a minute? Tune in to the Princeton Review Vocab Minute for a quick and entertaining way to build your understanding of those pesky SAT words you’ve been trying to master.

Flashcards and lists may work for some, but for those whose learning style leans toward the musical, it helps to hear the words in context with a catchy tune. Princeton Review developed a series of songs featuring some of the many difficult words students need to know for SATs. These thematic ditties present about a dozen words each, integrating definitions and using synonyms to reinforce the essential meaning of the vocabulary in a clever and memorable vignette.

Browse the titles on the web and click to select one that catches your eye. For example, the song “Polly” presents polymath, polychromatic and other challenging words featuring this prefix, meaning “many.” My favorite Vocab Minute is the Nigerian Email Song, a cautionary fable of sorts featuring words like capacious, opulent and indigent. The songs are labeled “Junior Level” or “Senior Level” though I can’t detect any difference in the content; I would say all titles are all equally useful for students from age 15 and up.

If you are an iTunes user, subscribe to this podcast and you’ll have all 80 songs (and the new ones released every couple weeks) conveniently handy next time you sync up your i-Pod. You may also subscribe to an RSS feed so you’ll know when they release new podcasts. -MELISSA THIBAULT

Vocab Minute

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Keep your synonyms simple with Thsrs

Welcome to the last week of 2008. It’s been a fun year for us here at Instructify, and we hope that 2009 brings good tidings and an onslaught of (attainable) resolutions for you and your classroom. Here are a few lists to end the year right.

77 Colorful Words – Stop trying to think of another word for “red” and just use this handy reference guide to pick the right one. Not much here except for different words for all your favorite basic colors, but there are a few activities that might be great for some simple fun around the classroom. Via TeachersDesk.org.

Archaeology’s Top 10 Finds – While most of us are content not digging in the earth for relics of history, there are many who go in search of our world’s buried treasures to discover more about the past. The real life Indiana Joneses at Archaeology Magazine have compiled their top 10 finds for 2008, and amongst the list are such wonders as the Masked Mummy and, erm, “Brown Gold” in Oregon. Check out the rest at MSNBC’s CosmicBlog.

430 Best Books of 2008 – When your students aren’t busy reading all that “required” stuff, let them know about these books, courtesy of Goodreads. The rankings are based on user votes, so social media decides who’s who in the world of lit here. Which, I guess is why it is no surprise that Stephanie Meyer holds the #1 & #2 slots for books in her Twilight series.

50 Best Websites of 2008 – Time Magazine presents this list of helpful, fun, odd, and otherwise creative websites that hit the scene in 2008. These are the best that 2008 has to offer for the World Wide Web, and cover topics ranging from finding good gas prices to peer advice to celebrity gossip. Surprisingly, Instructify didn’t make the cut this year, but there’s always a chance to make the 2009 list, right? Happy New Year, everyone. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography on Flickr

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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Whether you are 7 or 77, you probably love word search games. In fact, those might be the only two ages at which you love word searches. While not as challenging as crossword puzzles or Sudoku, word searches can be a fun way to pass some time and learn some new words. Unfortunately, most of the puzzles found in puzzle books are catered for a younger or older crowd, and are hardly ever applicable to your subject matter. Enter EdCreate’s Free Printable Wordsearch Generator.

This handy-dandy little gadget allows you to choose the words you want your students to hunt for, and it can be as easy or challenging as you like. You have the option to pick which direction the words will go: whether it be backwards or forwards, upside-down or downside-up, diagonal or anti-diagonal(?) – all it takes is clicking the boxes corresponding to the direction you want the words to go. You can also choose how many words will be in the puzzle and how many letters will appear on each row. Then, just give it a title and print away (there’s also an answer key, if you can’t decipher your own creation).

EdCreate has some other fun tools and games useful for learning, but most of the other things you’ll have to pay for. Stick to the easy-to-use word search creator, and have something useful for your students to work on next time there’s a sub. – JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

EdCreate’s WordSearch Generator

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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

Vocabulate so others might masticate. Or something. Play FreeRice, a fun online vocabulary game, where a healthy vocabulary means healthy food donated to starving people. For every word you define correctly, the United Nations World Food Program will donate 10 grains of rice. If you’re a bookish person, you can easily accumulate a Chinese take-out container’s worth of rice in a couple minutes.

FreeRice is designed to be fun for all vocabulary levels, and adjusts depending on which words you get right and wrong, so don’t be afraid if you don’t know what “coarctation” means (it means narrowing, apparently). According to the site, there are 50 levels in all, though folks rarely get past level 48.

FYI, there are small logos from sponsors on the page, but they aren’t intrusive, and since they’re footing the bill for the rice, you probably won’t mind.

You’ll definitely want to send your English students here before their next vocabulary test or during SAT season. Got the hankering for a master’s degree? GRE words abound on FreeRice. And since it’s for a good cause, you won’t feel guilty for spending your entire planning period trying to raise your level. –BILL FERRIS

FreeRice