TECHY TOOLS FOR SCHOOLS & EFL

The challenges in the new millennium require that both teachers and students become competent users of ICT, able to integrate Web 2.0 tools into their daily teaching and learning. Many of these tools are currently being used by educators to teach ESL or EFL. This blog is dedicated to those tools which can easily be adapted for use in the English classroom. It's a question of using these tools in innovative ways in order to engage our digital learners and motivate them to learn English!

Monday, October 1, 2012

WORDSIFT

Here is a tool I came across that I think could be useful for teachers working on reading skills. I think it could best be used by the teacher with the whole class, projecting the text in question using the OHP and working on the text as a group activity. As well as working on reading skills, teachers are introducing key vocabulary in a visual way which facilitates comprehension, esp. in a foreign language.

Wordsift visualizes texts and picks out the most frequent words used. Wordsift also does a google image search and retrieves images to match the two most frequent words found. Examples from the source text containing the most frequent word in the text is displayed under the Visual Thesaurus word web. One intended use of this feature is to organize the text to preview key vocabulary.