BP#15_2009124_Tool#5_Wordsift

Wordsift is one of the greatest finds that I have seen this month. It is an essential tool in a classroom full of English Language Learners (ELL) or English as a Second Language (ESL) students, or even Deaf Education students. Students that struggle with reading will find this as comparable as an interpreter in a room of gibberish. From the site itself:

" . . . think of a word much like a soccer ball or hackeysack. Think of a classroom as kind of playground in which words can be kicked around for fun and for learning - not drill and kill, nor list and define. WordSift enables teachers to create an environment where language is "talked about" as richly as possible. Much of language cannot be taught directly, but much of language is learned through active talk, so why not have a way of talking about language? Try pasting some text into WordSift, display it to your class, and talk about what you see. Be spontaneous and generative -- that is the stuff that forms the basis of strong language acquisition."

Students can use an online textbook and cut and paste the chapter into the text box. Then, after pressing sift, the words are placed in a cloud with the most often occurring word receiving the largest text. Also, Visual Thesaurus is place on the page, with the words already highlighted for easy lookup. On the left of the screen is a gallery of pictures that changes with the click of a word. For example, "valley" will bring up multiple images of different valleys. What better way to teach a word than to show many examples of it?

I vividly remember my undergrad teacher, Dr. Bird expressing his dismay at my class and the ideas of how to teach a simple vocabulary word like "bowl." The best way, he exclaimed, was to just bring about 25 or 30 different bowls to class and let the kids see them. Variety and simplicity. The spice of life.

A third and most excellent element in this site is that under the Visual Thesaurus, there is a list of sentences with the highlighted word shown. So not only are the words separated, defined, and illustrated, they are also placed back in context for the student to understand.

On a scale of 1 to 5 for ease of use in a Deaf Ed classroom, this rates a 5 about a million times.