Learning Kids Games: words

Showing posts with label words. Show all posts

Friday, June 10, 2011

Video Dictionary 2.0

I've just been having a look at Wordia which is a wonderful new dictionary site. The entries are all video clips submitted by ... well anyone!

It's a bit like a YouTube video dictionary. I've just been having a quick browse and I love it. Great site for native and non native speakers of English. Also great collection of different accents. Even a few 'celebrities' thrown in!

Marvelous. Just love it. Read More..

Saturday, December 18, 2010

Creating Video Sentences

Twist Our Words is a great site I spotted while watching TV in the UK. It enables you to create video sentences that are 'mashed up' from a collection of clips of UK TV celebrities saying each word. If you don't understand that then look at this example I created. Click the white arrow to play it.

Making a video like this is very simple, just go to: http://twist.channel4.com/words and you'll see a page full of words. Click on the words you want to put in your sentence.

Then click on the words will appear along the bottom. When your sentence is complete, click on the white arrow at the and to watch it.

If you like the video, then just click on submit and you'll be able to get a URL link for the video or and embed code to add it to your site or blog.

If you don't want to create your own sentence you can just click on 'Lucky Dip' and you'll get an automatically generated sentence.

I think Twist Our Words is a great tool to use with students to get them creating and listening to language.

They could try to make poems or haiku
They can produce a lucky dip sentence and then see how many word they can add to it without it loosing sense.
You could produce sentences that have errors in and get the students to try to spot the errors and correct them.
You can produce a collection of sentences and get students to decide which are correct and which are not.
You could have a competition to see which students can produce the longest grammatically correct sentence.
They could collect together all the words they can find that include a particular phoneme or all the word which rhyme.
They could try to make a video with all the words that contain 3 syllables and the same stress pattern.

I hope you can try a few of these ideas and they work for you and your students.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Create Quick Interactive Activities

I've just been looking at this really useful tool for creating interactive close text activities (300 words limit).

The tool is produced by Nottingham University and can work with quite a range of languages, not only English.

The first step is to grab a text you want to use with your students. I just grabbed the first couple of paragraphs of a BBC News Report. Paste the text into the field and select which type of words you want to remove. Then select the type of activity you want it to be. At present there are 3 choices:

Drag and drop
Fill in the blank
Multiple choice

Just click the one you want and then click on 'Submit' and wait for your text to appear.

The drag and drop activity works pretty well. The students see the words beneath the gapped text and drag them onto the gaps. If the words are correct, they turn blue and become part of the text, but if the are wrong, they turn red and return to their place.

With the fill in the blanks activity the students see the gapped text and click on the gaps to type in the missing words. Again, correct word go blue and wrong words go red. The students can right click on the gap to get a first letter hint, or the solution.

The multiple choice exercise is slightly more complicated, it generates a gapped text and then you have to right click on the gap to get the alternative choices to appear to the right of the screen. It's quite impressive that it generates its own credible alternative words for each gap, but when I tried to create an exercise that gapped multiple word types, it couldn't create the activity, so if you use this option just select one word type.

This is a really useful tool for quickly creating activities for students. The down side is these activities can't be saved, so you either have to use the activities in class with an interactive whiteboard or data projector, or get students to work autonomously to create and complete their own activities. My advice would be to do a few in class to show the students how they work, then get them to create their own on their own computers.

This is a great way to revise a text or to discover examples of particular structures in context. I like tat you can select to remove all numerals as this can be great for getting students to predict answers before reading for specific information.

I hope you enjoy using this tool and find it useful.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Monday, December 7, 2009

4 Similar Tools to Wordle

Wordle, a very simple tool for creating graphic word clouds of texts, has rocked the Edtech world and inspired a huge number of blog posts and teaching ideas, including my own back in September of 2008. That's why I decided to use it as the basis for the first task in a web based 1 week open free workshop on Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers that I'm moderating for SEETA.

As so many people are already familiar with Wordle, I thought I'd also share a few similar tools that can be used instead of or alongside Wordle with other web based resources to create useful learning materials for students. I've also added these here for anyone who doesn't make it along to the workshop.

Wordnik (no connection to the Nik in my name) is a great tool for helping students find out more information about word and create lists or related words to help them remember the words. It provides lots of great examples of the words being used and draws on social media sites for the examples, so you can see how the word is used in Twitter, see what images are tagged with the word in Flickr and lots more.
I wrote about Wordnik about a year ago when it was still Wordie, so look at this review if you want a bit more information. Creating word lists
I also created an activity for students to help them use the tool to work autonomously to develop their vocabulary. It needs a bit of updating now that the site has changed to Wordnik, but should give you some ideas about how it can be used I hope. List Your Favourite Words

Wordsift does a similar thing to Wordle, in that it produces a word cloud of words from a text, but it is far less visual and more functional. Once your students have produced the word cloud they can start actually clicking on the words and exploring their meanings and getting examples.
I wrote a review of WordSift here which shows a bit more about how to use it.Analysing Vocabulary in Texts
Here’s an example of how I’ve tried to integrate it with other web based tools and resources to create an activity for students to work on independently. Find Out More About Texts

Vocab Grabber is another tool that can be used to get more information about the words from a text. Vocab Grabber is more of a Dictionary / Thesaurus tool that pulls in information about words in a text, gives examples and also shows related words and word families.
I wrote this activity which exploits some marketing videos that have scripts along with WordGrabber and another tool called Future Me. I tried to use the combination of these tools to show how students could build good habits to enable them to learn, remember and revise new vocabulary. Develop Your Marketing Vocabulary

Easy define is a new tool that I just spotted this morning. It is a bit like a dictionary - word list creation tool. You simply type in a list of words ( or even paste in a complete text) and it will generate dictionary entries for all the words. You can then download these as a doc file or copy and past them. It will also produce a list of synonyms.
This is a great tool for creating paper based vocabulary worksheets. Once you’ve typed in your list or text and generated the definitions, you can simply download it and edit to create vocabulary records or matching activities. Should be a big time saver. You could get students to create word lists from their Wordle images.

I hope these tools are useful and if you know of other similar tools that you think are useful, please do post a link to them below, especially if you can include links to any materials you've created with them that you would like to share.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

How to Make a Word Search Puzzle for your Blog

If your students like doing Word Searches, then The Ultimate Word Search Maker could be just the thing for you.

It enables you to quickly and easily create your own Word Search Puzzles and embed them into your blog.

Here's an example I created for you to try out. Just click on the first and last letters of the words when you find them.

The puzzles are very easy to make. You simply go to the Word Search Maker site type in the words you want and the site will produce the puzzle grid for you with the words underneath it.

You then simply copy either a link or an embed code and add it to your site.

This is a really simple tool to use for those of you keen on Word Searches. For me the biggest problem with it is that it includes the words that students have to look for, so it is just a test of word recognition.

I would prefer to be able to produce Word Searches that don't have the words included so that students have to think a little more around the topic and mentally revise their existing vocabulary on the topic.

Well I guess you can't have everything and it is after all free, so..

Hope you find The Ultimate Word Search Maker useful.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Flickr and Wiktionary Based Image Dictionary

Shahi is a visual dictionary that combines Wiktionary content with Flickr images, and more! This is a really handy tool for students or in the classroom if you have a computer + projector set up.

All you do is type in your vocabulary word and you get images ( from Flickr, Google or Yahoo) and a definitions with part of speech and some example sentences from Wikitionary.

If you want to give your students a better view of the images that the Shahi finds in relation to the word, then just click on the image and it enlarges.

Of course the most common problem with picture dictionaries is that the concepts of many words, especially at higher levels aren't 'visual' as such and are much more abstract concepts. I did a search on 'noise' and here's what I got.

You can use this to your advantage though by getting students to think about the connections and associations between the words you search for and the images. You can turn this into a game and give points to the students with the best explanation for the connection between word and image. The explanation could be literal or more imaginative and narrative based.

One other thing that I like about Shahi, is that the results from each word you type in are 'piled up onto top of each other, so if you use it as a reference throughout a lesson or activity, you still have a record there of all the words that came up.

You could also use this feature in reverse, by creating an image word list before the activity so that students can prepare their vocabulary and refer to it during the activity.

Shahi is a nice versatile free tool and one that your students could easily use on their own. Hope you enjoy it.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Improve Typing and Punctuation and Have Fun

I've just been playing TypeRacer and for the first time in my life I have enjoyed trying to type faster and improve my spelling and punctuation (both of which are a constant struggle for me).

Typeracer is a really nicely designed activity which gives you a text to copy and measures your word speed as you type it into a field. As you type, as small image of a VW Beetle races across the top of the page and measures your WPM typing speed.

If you make any mistakes of spelling or punctuation, you have to correct them before you can continue.

What's also nice about the site, is that you can play without registering. If you do register though you can record your score and even play against opponents and challenge friends. This is great if you have quite competitive students.

This is a great way to get students improving their typing and also thinking about accurate spelling and punctuation and as I said before it's fun and free!

Hope you enjoy it.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Creating Word Lists

I had a very pleasant surprise yesterday when I started looking over what I thought was just another users created online dictionary and discovered that there is more to Wordie than meets the eye.

The site looks very simple and very text based, but when you log in and start to dig around a bit there are some really useful features.

Wordie enables students to create and share word lists, but it also does much more. Users can click through to a range of information sources related to the words, such as online dictionaries, Wikipedia, Thesaurus and even Amazon books related to the topic.

Perhaps more useful though, they can also get images related to their words. They can make notes about each word and view notes from other users who have also included the same word in their word lists. (You can see how it's done on this posting for students: List Your Favourite Words )

Some of the other really useful features can be found in the Tools section, where you can create a blog widget that reads from your word lists and generates a code for you to embed your own recent word or random words into your blog.

You can create your own personal RSS feed from the site, or you can even track the most recent comments on the words.

This is a really great tool for helping students to develop, learn and revise their vocabulary and of course it's all free.

Your students will need to have an email address to set up an account and use the word list features, but if you don't want to do that you can still use the word search functions or you could set up your own new vocabulary list for your students and then create a feed to embed in a blog for them.

Wordie is another of those sites that starts with a very simple idea and makes it into something really useful. Hope you enjoy it.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

What Can Students Learn from the Urban Dictionary?

I've just been struggling to write another activity for my Daily English Activities blog. I spent most of an hour browsing through the Urban Dictionary, another user created record of the modern English language.

On the one hand I thought that it was a complete waste of time in terms of finding any usable materials for EFL ESL students, but on the other hand I found it to be a really fascinating doorway into our modern culture and lifestyle.

The Urban dictionary is largely a user generated and edited collection of 'invented' words, some of which are gradually becoming part of our mainstream language, such as 'muffin tops' and 'spin doctor', whereas others .... well who knows? Will mass merchanditis and boyfriend drop soon become part of your everyday vocabulary?

In the end I decided to go ahead and use the site, as I thought that the cultural information in the content was so valuable. These are the word and definitions that I've chosen to use, and I think they give some valuable insights into our modern culture. Hope you enjoy them.