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WordSift: even more visual vocab goodness!

May 6, 2009 You've swooned over Wordle. Now meet WordSift, another very cool tool for visualizing text that offers even more features for a teacher to love. 



This demo of an Obama press conference opening statement, processed through WordSift, shows a typical result page, with green highlighted words from the Academic Word List, links to Google images and video and an interactive connection to VisualThesaurus. It also excerpts sentences that include any selected words.

The project was funded through a grant from the Council of Great City Schools to Stanford professor Kenji Hakuta, and developed by doctoral student Greg Wientjes, with design assistance from Diego Roman and Karen Thompson (doctoral students and former teachers).

WordSift's About page describes how it integrates other Web tools and how it might work in the classroom:

The program helps to quickly identify important words that appear in the text. This function is widely available in various Tag Cloud programs on the web, but we integrate it here with a few other functions, such as visualization of word relationships and Google searches of images and videos. With just a click on any word in the Tag Cloud, the program displays instances of sentences in which that word is used in the text.

For teachers, the tool offers a quick way of assessing the text that he or she is using for instruction. Teachers assess students, and the most successful teachers use this information to guide their teaching. So why not assess the text as well? By using WordSift, teachers get a heads up on key vocabulary appearing in the text, and can line instruction up with what might be challenging for students.

Are you going to be giving students some reading about photosynthesis or the Industrial Revolution? Paste the text into WordSift to see the most frequent words your students will encounter in the text. If you have access to an LCD projector in your classroom, you can share WordSift's results directly with your students. Since WordSift integrates search results from Google images and YouTube clips into its display, you can quickly show students what chloroplasts or textiles look like with just one click.

WordSift also allows users to see relationships among words. Want to help students understand difficult-to-define academic words such as analyze? Show students synonyms of this word from within WordSift, using the Visual Thesaurus®. The Visual Thesaurus acts like a thesaurus-cum-dictionary with brilliant graphics. For word geeks and psycholinguists, this is a lot of intrinsic fun. But for teachers, it is a great way of talking about vocabulary -- not as boring lists of definitions to be memorized, but as a web of relationships with other words -- a veritable social network of words. Although we are not affiliated with this product, we really like the capabilities of the Visual Thesaurus and have integrated some of them into WordSift, and certainly hope that we help their good business.

Check out this YouTube video for a full demo:

Posted by Joyce Valenza Ph.D on May 6, 2009 | Comments (1)