Digital literacy-WordSift

I think you must have already seen the picture with “ICT” when you visit my blog. This picture is made by some key words related to ICT. Is it very interesting? This kind of image is called “Word Cloud”, which can highlight some important information about a topic to help the information receiver understand.

WordSift

WordSift is a free website where you can make your own word cloud. It is very easy to be used. You can select a passage you want and paste it into the type box. Click the green ‘sift’ button, and your word cloud will form automatically.

If you are not happy with this style, you can tap the “Preset Styles” on the top left corner, where you can choose some styles from there. You may also want to edit the word cloud according to your own purpose, such as the colour set or the maximum number of words in this cloud. You can find the setting menu at the top right corner.

Once you have finished your setting, you can see the new style by pushing the refresh button. Certainly, you can download the picture. You will find a download option at the bottom of the setting list. You can choose the format as you need.

Now you can see your own work. The basic rule of forming a word cloud is in terms of the frequency of appearance of different words in a text. So if a word appears a lot, it will be bigger, and vice versa.

Teaching Ideas

I believe this tool can assist reading and writing class.

Reading

Predicting is a significant reading skill. Before the students start reading, they can predict the content of this text by the title or linking to their own schemata. The word cloud can highlight the key words, so the students can work together to predict the content of this passage with their own knowledge. By comparing with the traditional way, in which students may start reading some parts of the text and jump off the predicting section, with the word cloud students can only guess the content with these words, so it is a kind of gentle force.

If you want to know more about WordSift on reading facilitate, here is a link. Hope it could be helpful.

     Writing

      

   I think this tool is also very useful for writing feedback lesson. Because the tool can show the most frequent words, it can make effort on helping students practice using wider range vocabularies.

   How does it work? Very easy. If you click a word in this cloud, it will turn into red, as the picture shows, and then you may find a summary about this word in the frame below. It concludes the times of occurrences and the sentences that contain this word. Very clear.

You may want to see the detail of these sentences, you can just click the green button on the right corner, and the frame will be extended. When you select one sentence, this sentence will be located in text with green highlight. Thus, it is very user-friendly. Teachers can lead students to find the synonyms to replace these words. This skill is important.

In China, writing is always a shortage, especially their lexical resource. IELTS test has a writing requirement on lexical, which asks the students to use wide range vocabularies in writing, and convey precise meanings. The word cloud can facilitate this exercise.

Now you know how to use it in helping vocabularies range improvement, but how about the precise aspect? You may notice that there is a red box below, which is titled as “Search for a word in the Visual Thesaurus”. Actually, this is another software, but here is a link. When you click a word in the word cloud, the synonyms, the functions of these words, and examples can be found here. You hover your mouse over a vocabulary there, it will show you the definition of it. When your mouse fly over a dot, it can illustrate the speech patterns to you. In this way the students can learn new words, and this learning process is similar to our thinking process, so I think it should be easy to memorise.

Moreover, the students is not only simply memorise them, but also learn the functions and the meanings of these words. This is a self-learning process, to be specific, students can use WordSift after class as well.

Shortage

Although the pattern of it can be customised, the forms of clouds are limited, which will restrict the way of editing. This is the only shortage I found until now, but if you have some new ideas, please share it with me. :p