Thing 7

Image Generators

WordSift

WordSift is a pretty cool little site. I've always liked word clouds like Wordle. They look interesting and you can do some good vocabulary building with it. But then WordSift goes one further and has the visual thesaurus and pictures and videos related to the word.  

Assignment

An assignment for me would be to introduce new vocabulary to a student. I would have the word list for a new reading or listening ready to go. They could then copy and paste the list and explore the words that they don't know on their devices or as homework before the class. The production would then to take the words that they didn't know and keep a personal dictionary, using a website that has the function, or even a spread sheet. They could even make flash cards. This could be an ongoing assignment.

Benefit

My ESL students are addicted to translators. As their teacher, I want to try to wean them of it. It is one thing to enforce it in class, but their language learning experience is outside of class as well. If they have tools like this or even a visual thesaurus, the hope is that they kick their dependency. A good dictionary resource that was discovered while doing this assignment was Snappy Words.  This could be a great alternative dictionary site.