Weekend Website #50 Visuword

Every Friday I’ll send you a wonderful website that my classes and my parents love. I think you’ll find they’ll be a favorite of your students as they are of mine.

visuwords
Visuwords–makes words exciting

Age:

3rd grade-8th grade

Topic:

Word study

Address:

VisuWords

Review:

Visuwords is an online graphical dictionary where you can look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. The tool enables you to produce diagrams and learn how words associate and is another of the great Open Source websites (yes, they give their source code as well as the web site away for free)–like Visual Thesaurus, Wordle, Tagxedo–that makes the study of words as visual as a picture.You plug a word into the search field and up pops the connections to other words, its part of speech as well as associated words. If the net is particularly large, you can scroll in or out with the mouse wheel to see the big picture or the details. You can also click-drag the picture to focus in on disparate parts.

My fifth graders plugged words in and loved watching the clouds that grew from the simple start. Then they dragged a node and watched the entire net re-adapt to the new position.

Anything that gets kids excited about words, I’m all for.


Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-18 technology for 30 years. She is the editor/author of over a hundred tech ed resources including a K-12 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum. She is an adjunct professor in tech ed, Master Teacher, webmaster for four blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice, CSTA presentation reviewer, freelance journalist on tech ed topics, contributor to NEA Today, and author of the tech thrillers, To Hunt a Sub and Twenty-four Days. You can find her resources at Structured Learning.

Author: Jacqui
Welcome to my virtual classroom. I've been a tech teacher for 15 years, but modern technology offers more to get my ideas across to students than at any time in my career. Drop in to my class wikis, classroom blog, our internet start pages. I'll answer your questions about how to teach tech, what to teach when, where the best virtual sites are. Need more--let's chat about issues of importance in tech ed. Want to see what I'm doing today? Click the gravatar and select the grade.